optiplex 780 sff issue

Question

Hi all, I have a problem with my old 780 sff. Over the past several months my pc has been crashing more and more. Usually it gets a pixellated screen and just stops working. Every once in awhile I get a blue screen. Before the crashing started I upgraded from windows 7 to 10. It has a core 2 duo and 4GB ram. Prior to that the only problem I ever had was the power supply died and I replaced it. It worked fine for a couple of years. When I went to 10, the machine really started to have speed issues. I then replaced the 4 GB of ram (4X1) with 2 strips of 4GB. This really improved speed in windows 10. About 4 mos. later the occasional crash would occur. Couldn't figure out from the event viewer what was going on and dell diagnostics said everything was ok. I then swapped out the HDD with a crucial BX500 SDD and man this thing started to fly however the crashing slowly increased. I put the old ram back in to see if it was a ram problem, but crashing continued. I then cleaned up the whole inside and re-pasted the CPU with thermal grease, thinking maybe a heat issue. The crashing continued. I used diagnostics again which again indicated no problems the temp inside stays pretty much at 40C. Now the unit crashes consistently almost every time I go on the internet. Now I'm thinking graphics or motherboard. Since this is an old machine I'm not willing to sink much more money into it. Might buy a used graphic card for cheap to see if anything changes. Looking for any other ideas. Thanks. I'm not a gamer so this pc serves me well especially after adding the ram and SSD.

Popeyedd · Accepted Answer

Just to finalize this post even though I got no answers. Issue is resolved with a new graphics card.

Optiplex Desktops

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