New MB, CPU and GPU (too arrive later today, at a normal hour)

[Colonel Sanders]

Accoriding to Neweggs UPS package tracking, my Athlon 64 3000+, GA-K8N Ultra-9, and Aopen GeForce FX 6600GT shall arrive sometime later today.

Now, my install of Windows XP Home is recently fresh and still running pretty good, I really would prefer not to have to whipe out my hard-drive and perform a fresh install. What do I need to do before upgrading to a new MB? I don't really want to just slap in the new board and hope for the best- it took a long time to install and update all my games and other software, and I'd really prefer not to go through that again.

Thanks,

-L J

[ktkendall]

SO far my experience with MOBO swap out to a totally different model MOBO with XP has been that on mypc, I just went into devace manager and removed everything, then shut down, and swapped out the board and XP booted up and found everything it needed and I was fine other than having to reinstall printer, but in that case although it was a different make of MOBO it was the same chipset, in another one I did, I had no such luck, and that was a totally different MOBO, chipset and all, so I ended up having to boot with the XP cd and do a repair installation, and all was well..

[Colonel Sanders]

Do you mean remove every single driver or just the ones that deal with the MB? I have a strange feeling that might mean every single driver. . . Except my wireless card, and printer- but it's on a USB. . .

Also, is there any trick to removing the system devices, or does Windows actually let you do this through the device manage without complaining one bit? I don't really want to start experimenting with hacking away at those drivers until the new parts arrive.

L J

[lil Jimmie]

I've done it without removing any devices in Device Manager and had good luck but I've also had some not go as smooth and ended up doing a repair install which went well. You just won't know til you get there.

[Colonel Sanders]

So basically this procedure is going to be kinda like rolling dice?

Fun, fun.

L J

[glc]

Before shutting down, go into device manager, open up the IDE controller, update driver. Do not search, display a list of compatible drivers, choose standard dual. Uninstall the current video driver and drivers for the other onboard components on your motherboard and any cards that you will be removing. Do NOT reboot after any of the changes. Shut down and do the upgrade and it should boot into Windows.

[Digitalic]

I`ve had success by running a back up of the entire system prior to moving to the new board including system state. If the above mentioned methods aren`t successful it`s then a matter of simply re-installing the OS from scratch which will install the necessarry mobo drivers and then run a restore from your backup to "original location". It is very important though to make sure you have your partitions\drives configured the same so the restore will be successful like if you have programs\apps, documents and such stored or installed to different drives.

I`ve moved Intel based systems to AMD based systems like this numerous times. It also works nice if you were to say move a system from a single drive to a RAID array.

There`s a little cleaning up to do like installing a few drivers here and there and network settings but works nice if you don`t want to have to re-install all your apps.

[Colonel Sanders]

Well, I messed up when I began to remove the drivers for the VIA USB since I assumed that would conflict with the nVidia chipset. This effectively killed my mouse (doh!) and from there I shut down the PC and began taking apart the hardware. Windows refused to boot, but using the XP CD I repaired the installiation. Then I had to spend time on a phone with someone from India who I could barely understand in order to activate Windows.

In the end, everything worked out almost perfectly- I used a modified DLL to allow me to use 3rd party themes and I had to re-install that. Though strangely, when I started the install procedure for that DLL it acted quite odd, claiming the DLL was already there. . . A couple reboots later and I cant remember what else I did, but I finally have my PC upgraded, and Windows is 99% back to normal.

My wireless card ued to get 125Mbit per second connections, it is a Linksys wirelss G with speedbooster, as is my router. Router is on the same desk, but I just use the wireless for no real reason. . . I plan to eventually move it into another room but not for now. I kinda miss my 125Mbit connection to the router even though it doesn't really effect anything, I still wander what is going on.

L J