I love my Asus Eee PC 1000 Ubuntu 12.04 netbook, but I have a little problem. As I use it, the screen will randomly turn grey and become unresponsive. I can then only wait, until perhaps 10-60 secs. later, when I can interact again. Only the bar at the top of my screen retains its colour throughout.

I thought it might be Firefox, as I have a lot of tabs open. I installed Chromium, used it instead, and the problem remained.

A while back I upgraded from 1 to 2 Gb RAM. So, I thought recently, maybe I should increase the swap-space. I have 738Mb of 7.2Gb free on root; and 2Gb of 28Gb free on my home drive. I bought a 32 Gb SD Card and assigned 4Gb to swap space. cat /proc/swaps reports that the partition is being used. Alas the problem remains. Does anyone know what's wrong with my machine?

The SD Card has changed my machine somewhat, but the greying still happens. I ran free -m shortly after another episode, and received:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2004       1731        272          0        370        769
-/+ buffers/cache:        591       1412
Swap:         4073          0       4073

Update: Using 'top', I can see that compiz uses about 43% of the CPU (#1 position) when the greying occurs. After the greying, compiz drops back down to its usual 8% of CPU.