Dell 2009 xps desktop blue screen and vertical lines

[Dracoro]

Just recently my dad’s pc now has sets of 5/6 vertical lines (a few spread across screen) and also blue screen once windows tries to boot up.

Suddenly happened and can’t get into Windows (10) due to blue screen which only gives option to reboot.

I am assuming graphics card failure? Anyone concur? Just replace card to fix? But don’t want to spend on that if it doesn’t solve the issue. Not sure what they cost these days and maybe time to replace pc as old anyway….

[buggalugs]

I’d start with RAM

eta, and look for swollen caps on the motherboard.

Edited by buggalugs on Sunday 9th January 15:39

[colin79666]

If it has a separate graphics card and also has graphics on the motherboard then an easy test is just to remove the card and try the onboard. Zero cost to try that.

[Dracoro]

good idea….

It’s an old pc that my Dad only uses periodically for looking up work done for previous clients (my dad retired a while ago) so a bit overkill to get a new PC if I can get this one working….

[Dracoro]

Well, my Dad followed by initial advise and opened up the PC and hoovered up any dust/crap etc. and disconnect/re-connect everything.

And it's now working!

For now......

[deckster]

Dracoro said:

And it's now working!

For now......

....

Dracoro said:

It’s an old pc that my Dad only uses periodically for looking up work done for previous clients

Forgive the obvious suggestion, but it will be a good idea to extract any potentially valuable/useful old files off the machine before it dies completely.

[Dracoro]

Yeah, we have backups.

As it uses some old windows cad s/w, we can't open on tablet/iPad but we have the files so that's the important thing.