Latest kernal on old Sony Vaio
 

I had fedora 17 installed on my laptop (i686), then upgraded the hard drive. I created a live-usb with fedora 20, but it would hang on the flash screen immediately after boot live, debug, troubleshoot menu. I gave up with fedora and tried Debian, same thing. I tried Ubunutu next, same thing. I put original hard drive back in tried to boot, no go. I have tried all the options in every menu (boot, debug, basic graphics mode), but could never get a command prompt.
I found an old fedora 19 image and created a usb. It booted fine installed fine, restarted fine several times just to make sure. Then i ran update and tried to boot with latest kernel, splash screen loads, then hangs forever before log in screen. It will still boot with old kernel.
I tried Google, but couldn't find the same situation. What do I do next? The goal is to be able to use fedora 20 with latest kernel.

I suspect that your computer does not have PAE capability. Support for non-PAE hardware has been discontinued in newer kernels.
Try Linux Mint Debian Edition, 32 bit.
http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

I did some research and under flags in /proc/cpuinfo PAE is listed, so I don't think that is the problem. I also tried Linux Mint Debian as suggested and had the same results, it freezes on the splash screen just before the login menu.

Use a distro without splash screen, so that you can see where it actually hangs.
Also, please provide some info about CPU, RAM and videocard.

antix boots on my sony vaio pcg-fxa32, which is a ridiculous laptop by today's standards. 512mb ram, 20 gb hard drive (although the bios can only boot from a 4gb or less partition). 900 mhz AMD duron, and an anti radeon mobility (8mb ram!) graphics card.

Some details of your hardware can be good. the linux kernel, even debian ones, have been deprecating truly old hardware by default. the antiX kernel rolls in a lot of older drivers special.

Processor: Intel Pentium M Processor 1.86 GHz
RAM: 2 GB
Graphics: Intel Mobile 915GM Express

Can you recommend a distro without a splash screen? I will just start trying them all. The goal was to get Fedora to work though.

For a distro without splash try Salix. It may also be possible to disable the splash screen on Fedora, but systemd's parallel booting may obscure the exact point where the system is freezing.

on a debian distro, you can add "nosplash" to the boot parameters to eliminate the splash screen. perhaps there is a similar cheatcode for fedora.

I disabled the splash screen in fedora, but I'm not sure what to make of anything it says. I installed Salix to see what happens, ran slapt-get update and everything seems to work, it is using 3.10 where fedora is using 3.13. I'm not sure what I want to do from here. I appreciate everybody's help.

You can try to compile the latest kernel from kernel.org to see if your problem is kernel related. Just out of curiosity, why do you want the latest version?

The school I go to uses the fedora, so I have to use fedora there so for the sake of consistency I use it for personal things. I use the latest version on my desktop and wanted it on my laptop, again just for consistency. No real reason to want the absolute latest version on my laptop. I tried to install it and it didn't work so I wanted to see if I could fix for the sake of learning something I don't know. It is in no way important, I just like experimenting, I am going to look into kernel.org tomorrow.