I am new to Ubuntu. This is all about my problem.
Configuration :
I'm on an MSI-EX600 laptop with 3GB RAM and nVidia GeForce 8400M G
.
The display driver currently in use is Nouveau (xserver-xorg-video-nouveau), the OS is Ubuntu 13.10
Symptoms :
Sometimes I get these graphical glitches/artifacts/corruption that garbles up GUI elements, often to the point that I can't use it and have to log out or restart (it re-initializes the display I guess).
It got really annoying so I looked into it and discovered that it happens when opening large images in Firefox or Thunderbird. Image Viewer works well, but open a 4000px wide image in the browser and my screen fries.
I checked Resource Manager and there's no shortage of CPU or RAM (I don't have swap). Another symptom is playing Flash video consumes too much resources - it spins the fans like crazy. It's not heavy lifting and this PC isn't that old, so I expect it to work. It worked fine when it had Windows. It seems to be be a software issue.
What I tried :
Trying to fix this I attempted to switch to an nVidia proprietary driver (from Software & Updates > Additional Drivers
). This resulted in blank screen, so I restored Nouveau at boot and gave up. I tried again just now, but the latest nVidia driver doesn't work. I won't pick another one from the list because each time it takes forever to restore Nouveau from Recovery Mode, instead of there being a simple option to scrap last installed video driver.
I tried configuring a refresh rate of 60Hz at startup - xrandr -r 60
in Startup Applications
, still didn't do the trick.
How can I resolve this problem ?