raymac46 Posted December 25, 2015 Share Posted December 25, 2015 (edited) A friend from my coffee group crashed his hard drive last week. He had no system backup and the machine was 5 years old, so he decided the best thing to do was buy a new Acer mini desktop with Windows 10. I helped him recover his data - the hard drive was indeed terrible but I got his files using Linux. Then after we got his new unit working and configured I looked at the old box more closely - and I liked what I saw. It has a Core 2 Quad Q8300, 6 GB of RAM, DVD burner. Far too nice to dump in a landfill. I convinced my friend that I could replace the drive, install Linux and he'd have a nice backup machine - or one to give away to his kids. I was able to get a good deal from Newegg on a WD Blue 1 TB drive, and it arrived today. The removal and reinstall of the hard drive went great. Then things got interesting. I tried an install of Linux Mint 17.3 (the latest) and it worked OK except the background picture was fuzzy with a triple image squashed together. I could log out, log in and the picture cleared up, but as soon as I rebooted it was like I lost my glasses. Linux Mint MATE 17.3, Ubuntu 14.04 were no better. Ubuntu 15.10 (the latest) was even worse - the screen text was corrupt as well. It turns out that Intel's older video solutions aren't playing well with the later kernels. Odd - I never have had a problem with Intel video before - aside from it being crappy. I finally solved the issue by downgrading to the oldest of Linux Mint's LTS versions - LM 17 Qiana. That at least gives a decent display with the older GMA X4500 Intel video. No double and triple images when you boot up. So Happy Holidays all and watch out for the Intel snakes in the grass. Edited December 25, 2015 by raymac46 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 25, 2015 Share Posted December 25, 2015 Well he could get a discreet graphics card for like 30 bucks to pop in there as eventually the LTS version will update the kernel. Nice that you got it working though Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted December 25, 2015 Author Share Posted December 25, 2015 Yes that is what I would do but unfortunately I don't have any old video cards here right now. The good thing about Linux Mint is that it won't update the kernel unless you ask it to. I did all the updates after installing the older version and it still works fine. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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