Lines appearing on Screen.... Trying to figure out why

Question

I've got an older Dell Desktop Dimension 9200 running Windows 7. A few months ago, I started getting lines appearing on the monitor... they would appear when opening up a new window and would move around when I would drag and drop the window, sometimes disappearing altogether and then reappearing.

Here's a link to a screenshot of the issue (Not enough points to put directly in the post): http://sdrv.ms/1e8hE8J

At first, I thought it was the monitor. But switching out the monitor and using one that works perfectly on another computer yielded the same result.

Next I thought it could be the video card (A NVidia GeForce 7300 LE running the latest drivers) but the issue would persist if I connected to the computer through TeamViewer.

I don't think it's a software issue as I did a clean install of Windows about a year ago and I don't use the computer for too much.... but you never know I guess.

So I'm left wondering what the issue is here. Is it a motherboard issue? Or is it a video card issue? Or software somewhere? Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Those look like rendering artifacts and would indicate that its possible video card failure. I can't seem to confirm, but typically dell systems have a onboard graphics adaptor, and on a core 2 era machine, these are disabled when the discrete card is in place. If you have a VGA connector on the motherboard, even a capped one, you can try removing the discrete card to check if this still happens.

From what I'm seeing I was incorrect about my guess that this has a discrete graphics out - this is a slightly oddball system that uses a BTX form factor, and kills off most of the legacy ports. In this case you may need another graphics card to test - the XPS 410 is an identical model with slightly different base specs and lack these.