necessary reformat?

[ThrillKiller]

Hey all, i'm new to the forums and i just bought a bunch of upgrades that i need some advice on...

First, these are my current specs:

-Athlon 500
-GeForce 32mb DDR
-Asus K7M M/B
-196 PC133 RAM

ok, so obviously it was time for a proccessor upgrade. I thought i might as well make the jump to DDR RAM while i was at it. so, i bought:

-Athlon 1.33Ghz 266 FSB
-256 MB DDR RAM
-Asus A7M266 M/B

What I'm wondering is whether or not I should reimage my HDD and reinstall everything so I'll have a clean install of the above components. I'm running Win98. I'm thinking that since the upgrades are logical ones (i.e. same brands for the same components) maybe it'll be ok... but that may be a stupid assumption.

Any suggestions?

 

[Hender]

Always reinstall your OS when replacing a motherboard. A lot of Windows settings are around hardware on your motherboard, and if you're able to boot up at all, you'll have some problems.

It's a pain, yes, but it's necessary.

 

[chuckieland]

yes of course

 

[SXMP]

Definatley, youll run into more problems than imaginble trying to boot off of a HD with an OS with the drivers/registry/etc of another system

 

[JoeDaddy]

Ok, heres how you do it.

Boot into windows 98 w/ your old hardware.
Run regedit and export the HKLM\Enum key & subkeys.
Then delete HKLM\Enum
Next copy the cabs from the win98 directory on your cdrom to a folder on your hard drive.
Then shut down
Replace all the old parts w/ the new parts.
Start the computer up, but don't boot into windows, boot to dos and start the install of win98 from the directory that contains the cabs.

Thats it, all your programs and data will still be there, except your new hardware will be installed.
Then finish up installing your drivers/4in1's/etc