Comment 69 for bug 653714

I just discovered this bug as I acquired a Dell Inspiron 8500 a few weeks back and ran into the same problem. In fact, on my machine (same nVidia graphics), the problem even seems worse: Any attempt at using the nouveau driver so far has not only produced the distortions described by the original poster, but also ended with a GPU lock-up after a few minutes maximum. For that reason, I'm now running Xubuntu 12.04 on that machine, as this distribution still provides the older nvidia-96 proprietary driver - newer distros apparently dropped this version. With the proprietary driver, the laptop runs fine and actually quite smooth (considering the age and specs). As it would be nice to be able to run newer Linux distros on this machine, I'd be happy to help with experimenting/testing. I could install a newer distro (and hence - presumably - newer nouveau driver) on a second hard drive or on an external drive so I can test stuff. Any preferences which distro would be most helpful for you?