I am posting this on my friend's behalf.

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my friend's computer but it continuously froze, no desktop effects worked, and it was frankly unusable. I thought this might be an issue with Unity and how it interacts with his hardware, so I tried several other desktop environments on his machine. These include KDE, Xfce, and GNOME. The problems persisted regardless of the desktop environment.

I would like to note that he dual boots his system with Windows 7. Even there no desktop effects work but the system is reasonably stable.

The following screenshots describe some of his system information (He is running Xfce at this time):

1:

2:

Card information: intel corporation 82G33/G31 integrated graphics controller (rev02).

What is the issue and how can it be solved?

Please let me know if I should add any more information.

Thank you.