NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420 13.10

I have a Dell Dimdension 4550 I am trying to install Ubuntu 13.10 onto. I really would like tokick microsoft to the curb, but I can not figure this out for the life of me. The graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420. When I do a fresh install it works, but the system is unbearingly slow. When i check the system monitor the CPu is pegging out t 95%-100% usage. When I check the hardwade it says there is a problem with compiz. I tried multiple sugeestion to get the latest drivers, but when I install and reboot I get a black screen and nothing haapens. Any suggestions I truly would appreciate it.
thanks in advance

I had trouble with the same type of system. What finally got me working was to disable the acceleration support in the nouveau driver. Via sudo, I edited /etc/defaults/grub so that:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Became:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nouveau.noaccel=1"

And then:

sudo update-grub

I restarted the machine, and the graphics issues were resolved. Admittedly, I'm disabling the acceleration support - but I'd rather have slow correct graphics than fast incorrect ones.

In my case, the issue was that I'd have color corruption (in some cases, full white out) on icons and in terminals. At first I tried disabling the display compositing (Settings Manager -> Window Manager Tweaks -> Compositor). That helped a bit, but I still saw numerous issues.

I attempted to figure a way to install the nvidia driver, but my understanding is that I need the 96.43 one. The .run file from nvidia doesn't work for newer kernels, and I gave up on that approach after a while. I attempted to find a repository with a recent 96.43 package, but had no luck. My guess is that folks have better things to do with their time than update packages for drivers that support cards that are roughly a decade old...

Along the way, though, I had noticed that rdesktop had no display problems. I figured that the code there likely wasn't calling for acceleration, so I figured it was worth trying to disable it.