I have an old netbook (Dell Inspiron 910). It is really underpowered. But I recently added some memory and a larger drive. And it was working reasonably well running Ubuntu Mate 16.04. That is until I installed the most recent set of updates. I think they updated the kernel to 4.13. Now the graphical startup display is scrambled - it looks like the horizontal scan lines are displaced - rendering anything on the screen unreadable. Then when the desktop comes up, you can see a portion off to the right that looks correct. But most of the screen looks like the startup screen never gets removed.
If I can get the grub menu at startup and select an earlier kernel (4.10) this corrects the display problems but I am not sure everything else was working.
I tried installing Lubuntu with basically the same results. Lubuntu 17.10 looked correct running from the install USB stick but failed on the first reboot after install. 16.04 installed and ran correctly until I installed the updates. Then the same problem returned.
OK so what can be done? Can anyone tell me how to change the grub menu to default to an earlier kernel and maybe set the delay to a longer time? Other than that any hope of getting a fix? It is a rather old CPU and 32 bit only, support for which seems to be going away. So I would appreciate anything suggestions on things to try.
Thanks and sorry for an overly long message,
Bill