Phooey! Im a newly newbied Newby to Linux and I'm almost there! I've successfully loaded linuxmint 19.3 and have successfully run it to a point, sometimes for hours, sometimes just for a few minutes...when...Bam! the screen presents a scrambled screen of lines and colors and the system freezes. I know of no way to restart except to pull the power cord and start over. I know it's kind of old, but am using an HP Pavilion s3521p desktop that ran Windows Vista. As near as I can tell it's vintage 2011, very clean, but old. My best guess is that the problem might be the NVIDIA GeForce 6150 nForce 430 graphics card.
I have Linux Mint 19.3 loaded on the 640GB hard drive.
I have successfully clicked on Firefox and stayed there for as long as I wanted, and
I have clicked on Firefox and have immediately come into my colorful "Screen of Death".
I have 3 of these machines, given to me to be discarded, loaded Linux Mint 19.3 on two of them and get the same "Colorful Screen of Death".

Operating System Linux Mint 19.3
Cinnamon Version 4.4.5
Linux Kernal 5.0.0-32-generic
Processor AMD Athlon(™) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ x2
Memory 3.7 GiB
Hard Drives 17.6 GB
Graphics Card NVIDIA Corporation C61 [GeForce 6150 nForce 430]

I'd start by looking in the log files for some hints. I wouldn't be optimistic, because, if the system just froze, the cause might not have made it into the logs. However, they might show something, if not the ultimate cause of the freeze, perhaps some hints of brewing trouble.

Mint uses systemd, so this link might help: https://www.digitalocean.com/communi...e-systemd-logs

Mint also pipes log output into the traditional /var/log location using rsyslog (most distros do these days), but, in this case, journalctl might be more helpful, because you can narrow the search by time. At the link, scroll down to the section titled "Journal Filtering by Time."

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The problem is likely the nvidia graphics card driver. I haven't messed with nvidia cards very much but the little that I have showed me just how aggravating it can be.

Unfortunately I won't be of much help in fixing it. Hopefully a fellow member knows how to deal with this mess.

From my research it seemed like nvidia's driver is proprietary so somebody wrote an open source driver that works for most instances but occasionally(still too often!) it hiccups as described in the OP.

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check out this link might give you an idea what to look for: https://askubuntu.com/questions/2803...-video-drivers

from link above:

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That's my guess too.
That card is really, really old.
Last thing I heard, there's still a legacy driver for it, but it doesn't support current Xorg versions anymore.
Have a look here.

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My mother-in-law has similar hardware. Currently running Ubuntu (18.04 or 20.04; I don't recall), Mate DE, Noveau driver. No Colorful Screens of Death.

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See if including nouveau.noaccel=1 and/or nouveau.config=NvMSI=0 on kernel command line helps. There's also the (upstream default) DDX to try instead of (the reverse-engineered) xserver-xorg-video-nouveau or the proprietary tainting NVidia driver. See this 2 week old thread about the exact same OS, GPU and chipset.

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^ actually, you're righter!
I only thought about the proprietary driver.
The nouveau driver should just work.

OP hasn't shown us which driver it actually runs on.

ellsworth, please show us:

Ondoho, thanks for your patience, (being a Newbie) I had a hard time figuring out how to get this to you

Here are the results of lspci -k

00:00.0 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 Memory Controller (rev a1)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company MCP61 Memory Controller
00:01.0 ISA bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 LPC Bridge (rev a2)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company MCP61 LPC Bridge
00:01.1 SMBus: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 SMBus (rev a2)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company MCP61 SMBus
Kernel driver in use: nForce2_smbus
Kernel modules: i2c_nforce2
00:01.2 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 Memory Controller (rev a2)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company MCP61 Memory Controller
00:02.0 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 USB 1.1 Controller (rev a3)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company MCP61 USB 1.1 Controller
Kernel driver in use: ohci-pci
00:02.1 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 USB 2.0 Controller (rev a3)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company MCP61 USB 2.0 Controller
Kernel driver in use: ehci-pci
00:04.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 PCI bridge (rev a1)
00:05.0 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 High Definition Audio
(rev a2)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company MCP61 High Definition Audio
Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel
00:06.0 IDE interface: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 IDE (rev a2)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company MCP61 IDE
Kernel driver in use: pata_amd
Kernel modules: pata_amd, pata_acpi
00:07.0 Bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 Ethernet (rev a2)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company MCP61 Ethernet
Kernel driver in use: forcedeth
Kernel modules: forcedeth
00:08.0 IDE interface: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 SATA Controller (rev a2)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company MCP61 SATA Controller
Kernel driver in use: sata_nv
Kernel modules: sata_nv, pata_acpi
00:09.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 PCI Express bridge (rev a2)
Kernel driver in use: pcieport
00:0d.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation C61 [GeForce
6150SE nForce 430] (rev a2)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company C61 [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430]
Kernel driver in use: nouveau
Kernel modules: nvidiafb, nouveau
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] K8
[Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] K8
[Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] K8
[Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] K8
[Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
Kernel driver in use: k8temp
Kernel modules: k8temp
01:05.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): LSI Corporation FW322/323 [TrueFire] 1394a
Controller (rev 70)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company FW322/323 [TrueFire] 1394a
Controller
Kernel driver in use: firewire_ohci
Kernel modules: firewire_ohci
01:0a.0 Communication controller: Conexant Systems, Inc. HSF 56k
Data/Fax Modem
Subsystem: Conexant Systems, Inc. Soft Data Fax Modem with SmartCP

Yeah, that's nouveau.
My experience is that while it is almost mature with current Nvidia cards, it is just as buggy with older cards now as it used to be then.
Btw, this isn't a "card" as such, it's an Nvidia module baked into the motherboard. I used to have something similar a few years back, and it ran badly with nouveau, but better with nvidia.
Maybe RockDoctor could specify what exactly that "similar" GPU is.