display problems ongoing

[Don W. Jenkins]

I have received help already from the Ubuntu group in getting my 
wireless card working, which I appreciate greatly.  However, I have an 
ongoing problem with my display freezing which predates Ubuntu and has 
occurred in other distros and seems to have been a common factor through 
a complete change of hardware over time, so I'm pretty befuddled by it.  
What happens is that no matter what I try to solve the problem, 
eventually the monitor/display/input devices will freeze completely so 
that a hard reboot is required.  No mouse or keyboard response, just a 
frozen picure of whatever happened last on the monitor.  At present I 
have a Celeron 2.4 gig with 512mb of memory, a 60 gig HD for Linux and a 
40 gig HD for Windows 2000, the video card is an Nvidia Geforce FX 5200, 
and I have tried it with the nividia drivers installed and without in 
Ubuntu.  I don't see a really handy tool for changing the parameters of 
the video aside from manually editing XF86Config-4.  I have had some 
success in the past in reducing the color depth, which I tried by 
dropping that to 16, but it still froze on me just now.  I set the 
monitor parameters according to the manual, but that doesn't seem todo a 
lot of good.  It is a Digiview HR75 17".  The last distro I used was 
SuSE 9.1 Pro, which caused that same display problems, which is why I am 
trying to move on.  Prior to that I used another Debian based distro 
that I liked a lot, Libranet, that did not cause the display problems, 
but I could not get my wireless card working in that environment.  I 
seem to be half happy wherever I am.  I use the wireless 75% of the 
time, and I use the display the other 100%.  I prefer Debian over RPM's, 
so I was getting excited when the wireless fired up in Ubuntu, but 
deflated when the screen froze.  I will clarify that I have over the 
time I have had this problem not only changed distros, but I have 
changed Mobos a couple of times, changed monitors, changed video cards, 
changed memory, changed mice and keyboards, so it must be vibes from me 
or ions in the air.  If anyone has had similar problems and solved them, 
I'd appreciate hearing of it.  O/W I'll try something else. 

Thanks, Don J.