new motherboard, need to reinstall windows?

[VERTIGGO]

I'm going to convert from A8N32 to A8R32 so I can try out crossfire, and other than uninstalling nVidia drivers, etc, and installing the ATI drivers, should I reinstall windows? It seems like the cleanest way to transition, but I'd rather not lose all of my customizations, let alone save reinstall time for everything.

I tried to search, but almost nothing came up about this.

 

[boake]

Maybe reinstalling xp guarantee the stability of your system.

 

[furballi]

I always clean install WXP to eliminate any software conflict. Do it right the first time.

 

[EmMayEx]

I upgraded my wife (well her computer actually) from an Athlon 1.3 (non XP) processor to an Athlon 64 system I put together. I didn't want to hassle with reinstalling everything right away so I just swapped in the old hard drive and let Windows XP "find" all the new hardware when I booted the new system up. This takes a while because there are dozens of integrated motherboard devices that are found. I waited until everything was "found" before rebooting and even then it took a few cycles of finding and rebooting before Windows was happy with the state of the drivers.

In the end it worked a lot better than I expected. My wife was able to use the system for several months before I got around to doing a full reinstall. There were some minor instability issues but that may have been due to some overzealous overclocking on my part. Even after the reinstall I ended up dropping the clock speed on the Athlon 64 3000+ from 2.4 GHz to around 2.2 GHz in order to get Prime 95 to run for more than an hour.

So the answer is you can pretty radically change the hardware and get away with letting Windows XP "find" the new motherboard hardware in at least some cases but as always YMMV.

Max L.

 

[Zap]

If you don't want to hassle with a reinstall, then try it. It can work. However, it can also not work. If you already had issues with Windows, of course they won't get any better. One common effect is for Windows to "die" after a motherboard swap. In my household I did not have this problem when upgrading two computers using Nforce3 boards to Nforce4 boards, and one computer from a SiS 651 chipset to a SiS 661GX chipset, but going from the same SiS 661GX chipset to a Geforce6100 chipset effectively killed Windows, as in it wouldn't even start up in safe mode.

If you want to try it, best bet would be to download newest drivers to the hard drive first, then uninstall existing drivers, then swap boards and cross your fingers. Be prepared to reinstall if Windows dies, but if it works then no reason to not keep using it.

 

[imported_Seer]

here: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/77909774/m/1400925745

 

[VERTIGGO]

thanks guys, ill try this but i'll have literally everything backed up well.

 

[cheetoden]

I've booted up a machine after switching out a motherboard and cpu without any problems. Seems Win XP is much better at this than Win 98 used to be. I only had to install a couple of new drivers.