I have a new to me laptop.
On Windows 7 everything is working well. I tried Majaro Gnome, and it worked ok except I could not get the pacman to work, apps to update etc. I then tried Kodora and Suse and on both of those the screen locks up for no apparent reason with no errors. What will happen is the cursor still moves around the screen, it just does not appear to be able to interact with anything. No clicking works, and no keyboard functions work (cant tab, or anything).

Laptop is a Dell Latitude
i5 -2520M
4gb RAM
NVidia NVS 4200M

I dont know what other info would be helpful.
Thanks

Try fedora linux livedvd if it works then install using installation dvd.

Have you tried Ubuntu? It has decent support for older hardware. Also, check out this forum (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1726575). It sounds like a driver issue. Hope it helps.

Linux must have worked when you installed it - if only to the extent of typing your name in.
At what point did it stop working?

yes, it works for a bit when I first log into it.
One time a couple mins, one time a few seconds.
I can not seem to figure something specific that triggers it to lock up.
I tried to install OpenSuse with KDE and it did shut down KDE and put me at a terminal screen that gave me errors in regards to the GPU but I was not where I could write them down.

Did you load any special graphics drivers - such as the nvidia ones?

no, this is where my lack of knowledge comes in. I think I see in openSuse how to add packages in the install, but on the others it just installs stuff, and then locks up before I can do much of anything else.

It is not usually necessary to load extra graphics drivers if you just want a very basic functional screen.
For example, you can usually get a 1024 x 768 display

Try booting a live DVD or USB version of Mint or Ubuntu (no disk install), this ought to give you a better screen.
You should be able to connect to the internet, try out the mouse etc.

You could try installing a few small packages into memory with Where name.of.package is the name of the package you want to install...

On my hp stream 11, the symptoms you describe are what happens when I use it's trackpad and click while in X on kernels younger than 3.19. I've also had similar behavior when RAM gets scarce and SWAP isn't enabled. But the mouse still moves part doesn't last long if the misbehaving app / game isn't killed relatively quickly when that happens.