..... finally got the skip Dell running by using disk clone sw to install win 8 (bypasses the sata preinstallation driver issue - see other post)..... but took under 4 hours.

Anyways, using the nvidia geforce 8600 card that came with it at 1680x1050 leaves bad areas on screen, if you move a window, the background gets corrupted - see below.

This does not happen with an radeon hd3450 at 1400x1050.

Cant remember what res monitor supports but could this be card/monitor incompatability? I cant discount card problem as after unplugging and refitiing it a few times the display vanished.

To me that suggests graphics driver, the main giveaway for me is that you move from Nvidia to AMD and the problem disappears. Having said that, they are high resolutions for quite old cards, have you tried lower resolutions?

Yep, tried lower res with nvidia, looks crap but problem persists.

There is no option to change res on tother card.

Ill get round to trying a different monitor.

May look into finding a more recent driver.

[Edited on 10/9/15 by 02GF74]

last time I saw screen tearing like that it was the card overheating, - the fan was blocked solid with dust.

perhaps you have found why it was in a skip...

^^^^^^ yeah,i reckon the card is bad. Not overheating as when i got it, i spent 3+ hours cleaning the dust out of it.

The 2 graphics cards i have are fairly old, not sure which one performs better but can you recommend a better card , budget £20ish ebay.

I have a dell optiplex 380. Getting on a bit now and running windows 7, works quite well. Display is an on board Intel G41 and works ok. Tried windows 10 but slows it noticably, so I took it off and everything is fine again. First reaction was blame windows 10, but on reflection maybe I was asking to much from an old machine. Do you think maybe it could be similar to your situation? Have tried new machines running W10 and they fly, so maybe dell will be going to the skip as fixing/ upgrading it wouldn't be cost effective.