Thank you for your response! I waited for lap top to cool. took out batt., opened up memory and removed the 512 mb memory and reinstalled it. Powered it up...no change.
A couple of other observations I made were....the lap top had been on lights flashing the sequence over and over with no screen response for a half hour or so and it was warm. Not unusually hot or anything, but "normally warm" to the touch. I had tried to reset the pram in past attempts and at start up you can hear the hardrive (?) "spin" Like I had a cd in it or something. There is no cd in the cd player but you can definitly hear a SWOOOOSH start-up. I assume the hardrive is working.....rrright?