Video problem

[Maureen L Thomas]

Ok, so my roommate bought an acer aspire xc-704-g.  It has an intel 
celeron with intel HD Graphics with DDR3L sdram, shared memory.  I have 
wiped windows and installed debian 8.5.  When it reboots it goes all the 
way through the start up to the final sign on page but I get a blank 
screen with -blinking in the upper left hand corner.

I went into grub on reboot and added nomodeset and got the white screen 
saying OH NO! something has gone wrong notify the admin.  LOL I am the 
admin.  I also tried startx in recovery mode and got a black empty 
screen and a freeze.

I downloaded the drivers from debian for the intel graphics and got the 
latest 2.99 one.  I put it on a USB and plugged it in before the install 
began.  Either it didn't get picked up or doesn't work either.  My video 
screen is an HP w2007 20 inch and it was working fine with the old 
desktop and debian wheezy but it was hooked up via VGA.  I had to use a 
DVI converter to HDMI for this machine to hook it up.

What am I doing wrong or what can I do to get this machine up and 
running.  Thank you for helping.
Maureen