Newly installed Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon always crashes and runs in Fallback Mode
 

PC: Acer Aspire 5520 laptop, OS Windows Vista, 160GB HDD, AMD 64x2 2.0 GHz processor, 2GB ram, and Nvidia GeForce 7000M / nForce610M.

Being new to Linux, (and quite PC illiterate) it took me some time to study up on how to get it on my PC. Finally managed to download and verify the ISO, burnt to USB, changed boot sequence on PC to boot from the USB and loaded Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon (Sarah) OS in to its own partition on the HDD.

Upon boot (to Linux) the screen was unreadable so changed "quiet splash" to "nomodeset" and then Linux booted fine. (Well I could at least see the screen and menu's)
Then updated drivers in Driver Manager which included the nvidia-304 (recommended) driver, version 304.132.

Rebooted but still had same problem with screen being unreadable. (Think its called tearing? where there are about 4 vertical versions of the screen but they are also distorted and flickering badly.)

Went back to Driver Manager and selected the Nouveau display driver and now have the startup screen as I guess it is supposed to look - after editing the boot menu to nomodeset.

Only now I have a constant warning that the PC is: "Running in software rendering mode. Cinnamon is running without video hardware acceleration and, as a result you may observe much higher than normal CPU usage, etc, etc".
I wouldn't have any idea what normal CPU usage might be!

Every time I boot into Linux I have to edit "quiet splash" to "nomodeset", which is very annoying and obviously not how Linux should run.

Can somebody please help with fixing this problem?

Hi...

Please don't make duplicate threads. I have asked a moderator to close this one. If anyone wishes to help, please see the other thread here. ;)

Regards...