I had my netbook dual booted with Xp and Mint for quite a while. My wife prefers Mint now. However after I returned home after a few weeks away I found Mint not working quite right. It had a few issues including a seemingly broken Synaptic manager and an inability to upgrade. Plus the internet seemed to have problems, one of them being the screen going dim/dark for 10-20 seconds at a time during which nothing could be done on the net.

So since we never need Windows on the machine I decided to re-install Ubuntu as the single OS. All seems well except the dark screen issue is still there. Otherwise the internet connection is faster than before and sites that would not load (Hotmail) now do. My only other issue is with Passwords which I've covered in another topic.

Any ideas why the screen would be going dark and locking?

I see more or less the same symptom whenever I use FireFox to visit some web sites. When this happened I noticed that the page was loading information from other sites into different sections of the page. While the data was being loaded, the browser would become unresponsive. The browser would become responsive again after the data was loaded. So far, the browser has always recovered and it exhibits this symptom only when visiting a few specific web sites so I didn't think it was an issue.

Best regards,

Roy

Thanks. I'm glad it's not only me. As with my other problem the upgrade seems to have fixed this.