Well...I get the thing installed and wait an hour for updates and....my monitor goes into standby the second the OS loads...how do I change the resolution?

When you monitor goes into stand by (I guess black with the led blinking right?), then press "ctrl + alt + F2". You will reach a command line login doing that. Login as root and type "sax2" without the quotes. That will call SuSE configuration for the X sever. That should do the trick.

If you want to get your hands dirty, edit manually the file /etc/X11/XF86Config (it can be xorg, depends of your SuSE version) and replace the values for your monitor, graphics card, keyboard and mouse in that file as you need to...

Good luck!

when I execute sax2 in the command line, it askes me to change to a runlevel 3, how do I do that exactly?

Do just as I suggested above, but at the command line, type:

telinit 3

That should change your runlevel from 5 (graphical) to 3 (text). Then run "sax2" again. When you are done configuring your X server, simply run the telinit again with 5 instead of 3. It's also possible to edit a file in order to change the runlevels. That file is /etc/inittab

Stick with the first method though. I suggest this because:

1 - You will only need to change runlevel this time...
2 - If you screw up that file, it'll be hard to fix. Changing runlevel with the telinit or init commands will restore the runlevel back to normal after the reboot.

I just pointed the file because it's good to know where things in linux are and what they do . If telinit command fails, try "init" only instead of "telinit"

Good luck and lemme know if it works please

Regards!