MB swap / OS question

[dbarton]

Help!

I'm interested is getting a new MB.

Asus p4b266 seems like a good choice, but I saw a comment about "i/o ASIC =
bad DOS support". I still run a few important DOS programs so what does this comment mean to me?

Shall I get a p4b533 or is the p4b266 very good? I try and do this as rarely as I can, so I like to get something very good and stable. Will use a p4 1.8 chip due to cost.

My other question is about swapping boards. I run win 98 now, on a p3 450, and just want to drop my old hard drive onto the new board so I dont need to reinstall everything. (I have 200+ prgrams installed, and just dont have the time to do it any other way.

I heard about deleting the "enum" key, which would force windows to rebuild my hardware list. Good idea? Any other issues? In teh past I have had a PCI bridge issue, so wonder if that wil rear it's head again.

Any and all help much appreciated!

Dennis

 

[DaveSimmons]

If your old system is still reliable you could always keep it running for the DOS and other apps you don't want to reinstall, using a $50 KVM switch to share the monitor & keyboard (mouse sharing is less reliable FYI).

If not, you might want to use something like Drive Image or Ghost to backup your C: partition before trying to transplant the hard drive, and (I'm sure you already know this) back up any data files and e-mail you care about.

 

[CoDerEd]

yeah make the backup first, because you may be able to swap it but may be not.
I personally will recomend a clean install on a new mobo setup,
or buy a new hd , make a copy image to the new hd and you can swap it
to the new mobo setup while you still keep the original hd as a backup.