Zorin 15 instl problems

Hi,
I'm a newbie to Linux and thought I would try out Zorin but have encountered a couple of problems, which I'm hoping some kind people on this forum can give advice on. I am not a coder or developer etc and so have to look up every problem online and am not always sure of the terminology, though I do know how to open up a Terminal screen and can type in commands.
I have installed Zorin 15 Ultimate onto an HP Elitebook 8540p laptop, its probably around 10 years old and is in good condition with everything working well on it except the Windows 7 was way out of date.
I used balenaEtcher and a flash drive to install.
After a couple of attempts I managed to get the O/S onto the hard drive and booted up but have two problems.
1. The display is way out wack, the icons and screens and windows that pop up are way too large.
The original screen resolution is either 1600 x 900 or 1366 x 768, not sure which as I cant see the computer info anymore.
I think the O/S is displaying the resolution at something like 640 x 480 which is making it very difficult to see all the info on a pop up window.
I think I saw GNOME Display Editor flash up once or twice on a terminal window but I dont know how to get it to display to adjust the resolution.
2. It wont load the software.

Does anyone know the terminal commands or otherwise in order to fix these issues?
Any help would be much appreciated as I would hate to have to install MS Windows again.

I have similar issue when running Zorin as a VM, but can resolve when at the desktop. Can you launch settings at all from the menu? Do you see GRUB at boot time? If you can see GRUB press E to edit the command boot line - look for the line starting with 'Linux ... and ending with 'quiet splash' after the latter enter 'nomodeset' then exit and reboot.

Hi Swarfendor, thanks for your reply which I did try, Im not sure if it worked or not as I had to do multiple installs of the O/S, probably about 10 times to get it to work.
The software eventually loaded.
Re the graphics problem I do think the NVIDIA driver was the issue as I installed the O/S with the drivers supplied but probably they are too recent for my 10 year old laptop as when I did a driver update it removed the 440 version and put in the 304.108 version. I followed the below instructions which helped a lot.
https://medium.com/better-programming/h ... 9563052f6c
Overall I found installing Zorin 15 on my laptop to be quite time consuming, it wasnt a clean install and had many errors and crashes and needing many updates to make it work. Now its on I hope it will keep working, fingers crossed.
Regards,

Hi, If it starts to play up you may want to look at Zorin 12 Lite as an altrnative to Zorin 15 Core.

I agree with Swarf, for that machine, you would want Zorin Lite.
If it was me, I would try Zorin 15 LITE, first. 12 is great, but it should be able to handle 15 Lite, too.

When you run the installer, do not check the "Install additional software" - leave that unchecked. Do not install updates during install.

Once you are installed and boot up, you can then open the "Additional Drivers" (Though you never see the name anywhere, this app is actually called "jockey" for the curious...) from the App Menu and select your Graphics drivers. I hear different things on which seems to work- so, trial and error may win the day on that.

Next open a terminal and enter in

Code:

sudo apt-get update

Code:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade