[PLUG] Odd Laptop Behavior

[Dick Steffens]

 From time to time my laptop has booted up with an error message 
claiming that I'm running in lo graphic mode. It lets me proceed and 
offers to start up in default mode, which looks like normal. But some 
things don't seem to work right. It used to be that a hard boot fixed 
the problem, but not this morning. The thing that didn't work right was 
Wi-Fi. No Wi-Fi service was available, in spite of a neighborhood of 
Wi-Fi devices visible on my wife's laptop. I tried pulling the battery 
and waiting 30 seconds or more before putting it back, but got the same 
results. Then I tried booting from a thumb drive, and it worked 
normally. The installed OS is Ubuntu 16.04. The OS in the thumb drive is 
Ubuntu 18.04. After shutting down, pulling the thumb drive, and booting 
up again, 16.04 came up telling me I could upgrade to 18. That's not a 
message I've seen before. I declined and let the machine boot normally, 
and Wi-Fi was working again.

A message came up that I needed to run some updates, after which a 
reboot was required. During that reboot I got the lo graphics mode 
message again. And again, I don't have Wi-Fi. Hovering over the network 
icon no the top bar shows,

"Wi-Fi Networks
   device not ready"

I restarted with the thumb drive again, and  again I was able to connect 
to the house Wi-Fi. And again, 16.04 booted up with Wi-Fi working.

Any thoughts on what's going on?

This is a Lenovo X200 Tablet, if that makes any difference.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens