I have: ASUS P4V800D-X Intel Pentium 4 HT 2.80GHz 2.5GB RAM 40GB HDD nVidia 9500GT
When I installed nVidia drivers downloaded from nvidia.com website (selected recommended drivers), I simply can't boot into desktop. I pass through purple screen, and then I get black screen with flashing white underscore on left hand side. Keyboard shortcuts are not working and the only way to get to desktop mode is booting into recovery mode (holding shift when booting etc.). In recovery mode I run:
sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia*
and that is the only way to get a "normal" desktop environment. I put a quotes on a normal because computer is running slow and I can't set proper resolution.
Also, I've tried to install drivers via ubuntu GUI interface (proprietary, tested drivers), but with no luck.
I am using Ubuntu 14.04