Mint 17.1 KDE Screen Freezes

[kryptonite803]

I have been using linux mint for probably 3 or 4 months now and ever since I installed it, I have had severe issues with the screen arbitrarily freezing. The whole system doesn't seem to freeze as audio, video, and games continue to play, just the screen gets stuck and won't update. The only way to resolve the issue is to close the laptop lid, wait for it to sleep, then bring it out of sleep, and the screen resumes functioning.

I started with Cinnamon, but some research seemed to indicate that Cinnamon was a bit plagued with video issues, so I tried several desktop environments (XFCE, Unity, KDE). XKCE seemed to freeze more often with no support for putting the machine to sleep with the lid, and Unity would crash before even loading. So far, KDE has subjectively seemed to cause the problem least often. If nothing else, it has built in options for sleeping when the lid closes instead of being forced to do a hard reset on the machine.

Other research has suggested kernel or driver issues with Nvidia (system specs below). I believe I successfully installed Nvidia proprietary drivers and disabled Nouveau, though at this time I am having trouble confirming that beyond looking at dialogue boxes from Xserver Settings.

Looking through /var/log/syslog I see my wireless card acting up a lot. It seems to drop signal or something with messages like:

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nl80211: send_and_recv->nl_recvmsgs failed: -33
wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-STARTED 
Anacron 2.3 started on 2015-07-05

This series of events seems to occur pretty consistently around the time of the screen freeze, though it seems weird that it would have anything to do with the display at all. Also, I am fairly sure these events happen regularly while the display continues to operate just fine. This issue is supposedly solvable as well, but that's for another place and time, so long as it is not directly involved in this issue.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some system information and trouble shooting steps I tried, so let me know if there are any questions. Thanks in advance for any help or advice.

System info:

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Machine: Dell XPS 1501
GPU: NVidia GeForce 420M
Driver version: 340.76
OS: Mint 17.1 KDE 64-bit