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[itfactor36 AT gmail.com]

Thanks for the help on this!
Worked on this Toshiba using suggestions from here and other places.
Turns out that Win95 took up the entire 500MB+ of drive, so wiping away
this OS made getting further info that much more interesting. 
Laptop's modem turns out to be a PCMCIA USR 3056 -- one of those
useless-for-Linux WINMODEMS(!) -- so ppp and dialup svcs out for now
:-(.  From DOS's MSD, the video is a 'CHIPS 65520/525/530 (Vesa)
Flat Panel VGA', so vesa X setups apparently work great on this.  

Using unzip on bl3-40.zip from another Linux system, tar plus gzip on
this other system (.tgz tarball file), and then tar plus gunzip on the
laptop from tomsrtbt decompressed the necessary startup files into DOS
just fine.
Set up the laptop to boot hard drive's /dev/hda1 from a DOS boot
floppy-disk containing just the system files, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and BASLIN
files (hd.bat's loadlin.exe using zimage.4dx, and no .img files). 
The 20MB swap partition is as indicated previously.  The
BasicLinux/Slackware forms of the 4-5 Win9x Sysedit files are various
startup scripts such as /etc/rc and /etc/fstab, where startup of
services and mounting of partitions occur.

Next goal would be to see about having the hard drive boot without a
DOS loadlin-containing floppy.  Maybe using LILO the LInuxLOader
on /dev/hda1 would help speed up booting?  Another goal is to
maybe tune the ext2 filesystem to make it journalling.... the ext3
option.  Tuning the video options as suggested by others would be
great if this will help run X better.
Most suggestions centered around using the SVGA server and tweaking the XF86Config file (if this is correct)
Additional Slackware 4.0 pkg's would be great once the pport Iomega
ZipDrive module set up and appropriate packages copied to Zipdisks
using other PCs first.  Naturally, getting more memory to the
point of memory-maxing this old Toshiba will certainly not hurt should
this become easily available.
Anyone know which module in BL3-40 would get an EXP CDS 940 PCMCIA 2X
CD-ROM and 16 bit soundcard combination working properly as it did in
Win9x ??  If card-CD-ROM working right in BL3, then maybe playing
multimedia (CD's) and copying from CD's easier.

More hints always welcome.  Although "too many cooks can spoil the soup", at the same time "two heads are better than one"
itfactor36