I have a problem with my set up, I'd be grateful if anyone could help. It's a bit of a long story.

I'm running 10.04 on a dell pc.

Some time ago I was removing old kernels using synaptic, and while I'm aware it's not recommended to 'completely remove' the old kernels, I couldn't find any information on whu this was not reccomended, so I did it to see what would happen.

On next boot the graphics suddenly became very laggy, when performing tasks such as starting the desktop (gnome) , full screening anything, maximising windows.

On booting from a live cd (trisquel) this problem did not reoccur and it was possible to still use the machine so I figured I'll wait a few months until I can afford an extra hard drive (to back up my data) so I can simply wipe the drive and reinstall with a new OS.

I was keeping a 30g file for a friend. He had a spare 40 gig hard drive so I invited him round to hook it up to my machine so he could take his data away and I wouldn't have to worry about it. I'm not experienced with hardware and he is.

I was surprised that he didn't shut down the pc properly, he just switched off with the power button, ttok the pc apart, plugged in the extra 40 gig hard drive, and put it all back together again.

Then when we attempted to reboot the computer there was nothing, no power to anything except the led behind the power button.

So, we tried the same hard drive and graphics card inside a new case he had constructed. This time the power was flowing but the motherboard made an unearthly screeching noise that seemed to be saying 'do not want'.

Removing the graphics card seemed to allow the power to flow without the motherboard complaining, so he suggested I buy a new graphics card. However I'm skeptical this will work, as I'm not sure if the problem really lies with the card but more how the power resources are being allocated. I don't want to waste money on a new card if there's some other way of solving the problem.

I'll add some more details to the thread ie the spec of the current graphics card and the spec of the various components of the two cases that we have tried, but I don't have access to these at the moment.

In the mean time, any advice or requests for more info would be greatly appreciated.