Greetings to all. I have a question about a Dell Precision 3550 laptop which I purchased recently. The laptop came with Ubuntu 18 pre-installed but since I much prefer Mint I installed version 20.

One minor problem I have is that occasionally after waking from Sleep mode I lose my wi-fi connection and I have to disable and then re-enable the connection. Not a big deal. But yesterday while trying to format 2 new PNY USB thumb drives (32 and 64GB) the system suddenly wouldn't mount any USB drive, including an external HD that had previously worked fine. I had to reboot the system to get it all working again.

So, now I'm thinking maybe I should upgrade to 20.1; however, I'm aware that upgrading can break things that weren't previously broken. Is there anyone out there that has a Precision 3550 running Mint? If so, I'd like to hear about your experience.

Many thanks.

You should've stuck to the preinstalled Ubuntu version. It's not better or worse than Mint, but since DELL installed it, it probably was configured just so for your hardware...

You can search the wifi problem on the net, or just go through networkmanager settings yourself, maybe there's some checkbox to un/tick.

About the USB drives, the description is too vague. Tell us exactly what's happening, what you are doing, how the system reacts.

@ondoho Thanks for your response.

Yes, I probably should have left things as they were and I knew that although Ubuntu and Mint are similar they are not the same. Perhaps I was overly optimistic that all would be well. And so far, everything else seems to be working fine. I will take a look at the network settings.

As for the USB drives, after inserting a drive into the port the system made the distinctive sound it makes when a drive is inserted and about to mount but it kept looping through that sound and the drive didn't mount. Since that happened I haven't had any problems with mounting external drives. But I suppose the problem could return at some point.