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How do I upgrade my PC (new mobo/gfx) WITHOUT reinstalling Windows XP?

UNCjigga

UNCjigga

Lifer
OK so I bought a Shuttle XPC along with a 7600GS and now its time to transfer HDD, CPU, RAM and DVD-writer from the old behemoth case to the cute lil' XPC. The problem is, the XPC uses a different chipset (Nforce4 vs. Nforce3), PCI Express, and different I/O. Can I still avoid having to reinstall Windows XP? I thought there were certain steps I could do before moving (i.e. delete all devices, sysprep tool) that should make it easier, but I'm not yet sure what the best practice is to have XP redetect everything and avoid the dreaded Blue Screen STOP error of "inaccessible boot device". Any help is appreciated (or just point me to where this has been already discussed).
 
Hi, when you go from NF3 to NF4 you should be able to make fairly smooth transition without a fresh install. If you switch to Intel (or vice versa), then you are in trouble. Your system will start looking for the drivers for the new hardware, just like a new installation. If it finds them it will just load them up. One thing you might do is uninstall as many old drivers (video, etc.) as possible before the switch. This way it will be sure to ask for the new Drivers that you can load off the CD that came with your board/system an download the rest.

It's always best to do a reinstall, but I seldom do because I change motherboards so often.

Good luck!
 
Mergeideuse this to avoid the stop 0X000000007B messeage. You will need to do this before you make the switch.

 
Originally posted by: AndyT
Hi, when you go from NF3 to NF4 you should be able to make fairly smooth transition without a fresh install. If you switch to Intel (or vice versa), then you are in trouble. Your system will start looking for the drivers for the new hardware, just like a new installation. If it finds them it will just load them up. One thing you might do is uninstall as many old drivers (video, etc.) as possible before the switch. This way it will be sure to ask for the new Drivers that you can load off the CD that came with your board/system an download the rest.

It's always best to do a reinstall, but I seldom do because I change motherboards so often.

Good luck!
Click to expand...
Yup, a friend of mine upgraded his PC with my old parts just after I put this PC together, we uninstalled all chipset, graphics and peripheral drivers, restarted in safe mode and removed anything else remotely related to manufacturers, then put it all back together (same hard drives, different motherboard CPU and graphics card) and installed everything for those as normal. No problems yet and this was two months ago.
 
Well, it was all done in just under 2 hours, and everything worked! Except now I've got a pesky image quality problem when playing back video (all grainy/tearing and the colors are way off) so I need to figure out what's wrong with the driver or my video software.
 
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