Have a Dell 531S Vista 32 bit purchased new years ago. Photos in our photo folders taken by our own cameras mostly 6MP. It is my wife + little kid's computer. As best I know, from day 1, when using the standard Windows photo viewer to open and look at photos, randomly on the 5th, 6th, 7th or 8th whatever photo, the photo would open as gibberish... assorted blocks of colors. Close the photo, try again, it would work until the next random time. Size of photo did not matter. .5MP or 8MP... the gibberish could happen.
After a photo is open, you can keep it open for an hour - no problem. It is the act of OPENING that triggers it. Happening for years. But now...
As the kids stopped being babies, became older, they want to play games... playing simple games would make the fans roar on this simple computer, so I installed a dedicated graphics card.
And now... when using the standard Windows photo viewer to open and look at photos, randomly on the 5th, 6th, 7th or 8th whatever photo, the Windows photo viewer closes. Clearly, the gibberish event has been replaced by the program closing. Maybe the photo prior to the old gibberish, and now the program closing, opened slightly slowly... maybe.
Because the same defect is being seen with a new graphics card, I am wondering if this is a mother board problem?
Other than Windows photo viewer, the Windows Media Player Visualizaion that shows photo slideshows of your photos will also close after it shows a bunch of photos.
Playing youtubes, games, kids playing with MS paint... no problems.
The only other odd thing about this computer, from day 1, the hard drive seems to work more than normal. Nearly constantly. I have turned off services and indexing and tried many things. It did not change it. Probably not connected to the issue, but thought I should mention it.