problems with ubuntu and the m1530

Ok so i installed ubuntu and everything was working great on my dell xps m1530. My screen res was 1680 by 1050 but i wanted a little more eye candy so I enabled some of the visual effects. It told me that it had to install drivers for my graphics card and this seemed fine to me. After it finished i had to restart my computer and ubuntu came up with a screen res of 640 by 480 and i couldnt change it to anything higher. I then got fed up and installed envy and that just made everything worse. Now whenever i boot into ubuntu my laptop monitor starts out white then black lines slowly start to appear. Then after awhile it tells me that its in safe graphics mode... What can i do to fix this?

by the way my graphics card is a nvidia 8600m

 

If you reinstall ubuntu, start by running "glxgears" in the terminal. This will give you a sense of your video rendering speed w/out your gpu. Next, install the "new" nvidia driver in applications-->add/remove-->system tools. Restart your laptop. When you go to enable compiz, your driver manager should ask to enable your new driver. Enable it, restart and run glxgears first thing. Your benchmark scores should be much much higher. 8.04 is a little buggy but it does work with the 8600m.

Never use Envy. It does an end run around apt so your dependencies get screwed up.

 

OR, to fix the issue (which is the nvidia kernel module is for a different kernel than the one you have loaded) open a terminal, and run sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get upgrade

Edit: and envy does not to an end run around the repoes, it uses the nvidia driver installer from nvidia.

 

^^^ Yeah, but the point is that, even though Envy uses the same driver, its installation is sometimes not recognized by apt.