Screen crashes

[rustleg]

I have installed Mint9 on an old Samsung laptop and at times the video crashes with flickering/flashing stripe patterns or just blank. I didn't know how to reboot except to switch off, but this doesn't give me back my system so I have to reinstall (thankfully I have a partition image taken with BootitNG). I tried various keypresses like Ctrl-Alt F4 to get a terminal. Once it did provide one but with a very dodgy unstable faint text but last time nothing - in any event not sure what I'd do at a terminal apart from try sudo reboot. Not sure if I should post this in hardware or window manager forums etc.

One thing which caused this problem was selecting an OpenGL screensaver, so after reinstalling I removed all Compiz packages via Synaptic, but this hasn't sorted the problem. Last time was when I exited some configuration panel in the control panel sections (this panel wasn't screen related).

The laptop is a Samsung Sens V20, 512MB ram, 30GB hard drive, integrated graphics Intel 82845G Graphics Controller. I run on mains power- the battery is very poor (get a warning on every boot it is only 15% capacity). It was struggling recently under Windows XP - I suspect the latest security updates have put a heavy burden on low memory systems, so I decided to ditch it and try Linux.

Basically I'm trying to set up a system just for web browsing with Firefox so I'm tempted to try another flavour of Linux, but this may not solve the problem and I like what I see in Mint so I'd like to solve this here if possible. I'm not entirely a Linux newbie but my knowledge of drivers, X, window managers, etc is next to nothing. I could load Ubuntu 10.04LTS but I suspect this wouldn't help. Alternatively I use Debian Lenny at home so maybe I could try that.

Some pointers re what to do next would be welcomed. I could load another OS or try to fiddle with some of Mint's settings. Any ideas please?

I'll post some info from the system if necessary but I thought I'd wait for an initial response first as I've got to reinstate the system to do this.

[oobetimer]

Firefox is slow and heavy, Opera is light and fast ..

If you remove apt-xapian-index package, Your PC does not burdened so easy ..

[rustleg]

Firefox is slow and heavy, Opera is light and fast ..

If you remove apt-xapian-index package, Your PC does not burdened so easy ..

Thanks for the info re the apt-xapian-index package slowing things down, but I'm not complaining about Mint's speed - its the screen crashing I have a problem with.

[rustleg]

Doing more googling it appears that the Linux drivers for the Intel 82845G Graphics Controller have problems so I reluctantly decided to revert the laptop to Windows. It's only used for surfing the web so I guess it can run slowly without much real pain.