I've been searching the askubuntu forum for the past 3 days trying to figure out what's going on with my system and I have tried a lot of things but to no avail. So, I will explain my situation and tell you what I have tried and I hope someone can help me :)

I have an: HP Workstation xw4100 Pentium(R) 4 3.00 GHz 1.5 GB RAM NVIDIA Quadro4 380 XGL graphics card

It came with Windows XP and I set it up (with WUBI) to dual boot with Ubuntu 12.04

After installation I had the problem that so many people had with it booting to a black screen (mine was actually booting to the terminal basic shell) that is fixed by adding nomodeset into the grub. When I do that, MY screen resolution becomes stuck in 1280x768 (as opposed to 1366x768 before adding nomodeset) (and also, when running XP the best resolution is 1280x720)

When I go to "additional drivers" it doesn't show any proprietary drivers, so I manually downloaded them using this command:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

but after rebooting, that made the graphics even worse (now stuck as 800x600) SO I tried to configure the drivers with sudo nvidia-xconfig but that simply created an empty xorg.config file. I found one place where a guy gave information to manually input into the xorg.config file but that had no effect at all.

Lastly I tried to install previous versions of the NVIDIA drivers, but they wouldn't even fully install.

So now I have just re-installed Ubuntu 12.04 and I either need to find a better solution to the first problem (nomodeset) or get the nouveau driver to correctly configure to work with my nvidia graphics.

Thanks for your help ahead of time!