Mobo/cpu upgrade without reinstalling xp?

[mebiuspower]

Hi fellow geeks,

I've finally ditched my oven (P4) to jump on the new Core 2 Duo E6600...

Now I've upgraded the mobo and cpu and fired the baby up... xp is giving me a blue error screen then automatically restart itself. I did remember a while ago that it's impossible to use the same installation of XP if you do any major hardware upgrade. Can I keep my current installatin of XP without having to reformat and reinstall everything? Thanks.

mebiuspower

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Howdy, you will most likely have to do at least a repair/install and will definitely need to reactivate. If you ask nicely, MS will usually reactivate even if you have an oem version of XP. 🙂

 

[Lord Evermore]

Well what probably would have been a good idea was at least uninstalling the chipset drivers before you swapped hardware. But a Repair install is a good solution since it saves all your software and files, only resets Windows itself (and integrated applications) including all drivers back to a fresh install state so you have to download all the updates again and install all drivers.

 

[mebiuspower]

Yep I had to run the windows repair feature after I booted to the XP (slipstreamed) SP2 CD.

When it was (re)installing it did tell me it had trouble finding a few files... then after I return to windows it did a few finiky things like hanging randomly because it sort of overwritten new system files with the old ones.

48 patches later and a hole bunch of uninstall/reinstall of drivers... it seems to be OK. I just don't want to spend 1-2 days format/reinstall/reconfigure everything.

Hopefully XP won't crap out on me until Vista comes.