By artifacts, I mean it looks a little like the 'artifacts' I'd get when I used to overclock and pushed it a little too far. In this case, it's a black bar at the top, about an inch thick, with a bunch of static that's not just black and white, but colorful. I think it was just red, green, and blue, but I don't remember. If I let X start, I can make out a white box "behind" the static that start in the middle of the screen and moves when I move the mouse. I could take a picture of it if you want?

I got this laptop from Amazon and on the product page it said E-450. They don't have the best tech spec summaries, most of the others just said "E series," but I'm hoping they upgraded it, and didn't make a mistake in the specs. I guess I'd be able to get a partial refund if they did make a mistake... http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-43834HU...uckduckgo-d-20 This page shows the Radeon HD 6320 as an IGP, part of the Fusion E-450.

Base on what I read, it appears that processor has a part of it dedicated to HD video. My desktop has an Nvidia Gforce 8600 GTS or something, this add-on card has it's own Graphics processing unit (GPU) and it's own memory, it's an expensive card with a fan to keep the GPU at the right temperature. Such a card is impracticle for a laptop, traditionally laptops graphics were powered by the Central processing unit (CPU) which took away resources from other processes when you pushed it such as playing 3D games etc. making other processes slower than normal. It appears this processor has a section dedicated to HD video which the way I see it, should not affect performance in other processes when your pushing the graphics.

Anyway, if you still have testing installed somewhere, it'd probably be worth a try booting using the vesa driver to try and get fglrx happening, otherwise you may have to go the other route by adding testing to you stable sources.list and installing just fglrx stuff, of course, many other packages will need to be upgraded as dependencies for that to happen, but it's not uncommon to mix different versions of Debian. Knoppix live CD is a mix of stable, testing and sid. Look at post # 3.

I tried vga=795 and vga=792. 792 is what my display is stuck at in Stable. Both did the same thing, showed static before giving me a chance to log in as root. It's actually getting a little farther than initrd, I saw a lot of scrolling text but I didn't recognize anything. Here's a picture of the static, I saw a lot of different colors, not just RGB:
http://i.imgur.com/yvrDQ.jpg