Ok just bought a new video card should I reinstall Windows or not poll inside!

[Dreadogg]

Hope the poll works!

 

[Jayczar]

what are you polling? what is the relevance of this poll?

 

[snow patrol]

Should you reinstall what? If you mean should you reformat, then hell, NO! Just remove the old graphics card drivers and shut down, swap the cards and install the new card's drivers.

 

[aircooled]

What snow patrol said.

Just delete your existing card from device manager, shut down and install the new card, boot up and install it's latest driver.



edit = typo's

 

[dude]

No! Don't do that! Just leave it laying in the antistatic bag in the shipping box....

 

[Rand]

Remove the old drivers, and any associated files remaining on the HDD, search and clean the registry of referenced to your old graphics card.

Then pop in your new board and in stall the drivers as usual.

No reason to reinstall the OS unless you encounter problems.

 

[Dreadogg]

Hay I did'nt think this was that silly of a question sorry that I ask I just thought that maybe others had opinions and other experiances with upgrading Video cards and losing performance without installing OK? And for the poll if you dont want to vote than dont, I just figured that some would just have a quick yes or no answere! Sorry to waste all your valuable time with my stupid post!

 

[Dreadogg]

By the way my system is setup so sweet that it take very little time to reformat! I personally think its wise to reinstall windows anyone else back my opinion with some facts!

 

[aircooled]

Your post is not stupid..... If you have an older windows install with many problems, then a complete format/re-install is appropriate...but for a general hardware change (especially video cards), there is no reson the re-install the OS unless you have had previous problems that are OS related.

Just delete the old video card from device manager, shut dowm the computer. Install the new video card, cancel all attempts of windows tring to install a driver. Then install the latest driver from the manufactureres website.

 

[Actaeon]

Well, Depends, I would do a reformat switching from one brand to another (I reformatted when I got my new AMD mobo, was using a celeron before).

If i was switching cards.. from lets say, a gf2 to a gf3, then no, I would not reformat. Going from Nvidia to ATi, (or vise versa), I probally would have.

I rather not have to deal with the problem, and by the time I upgrade, I would have probally needed a reformat anyway. It only takes several hours for me.

Jus what I do.
-Jonathan

 

[Sunner]

Just uninstall drivers, change cards, install new drivers, and go play some games.

Unless you run into problems, why bother?

 

[nemesismk2]

There is usually no need to reinstall Windows unless your having problems. You also have to make sure that the old drivers are removed so check your windows system directory to make sure. If they are still present then manually delete them all and reboot, I've always done this when changing video cards or upgrading drivers etc and I've never had any problems.

The drivers are usually named for easy identification:-

NV???=Nvidia
S3???=S3 (easy one)
PMX???=PowerVR

etc etc

 

[randypj]

Well........lookie here.....a poll that addresses the question I was just fixin' to ask.

I'm gonna be replacing a Creative TNT2 Ultra with a GF 4 ti4200 in an Asus P3B-F with W2K Pro. I didn't install any of the extra Creative crape that came on the cd, and have only been using Detonator drivers. I learned the hard way with my Diamond TNT, not to install a buncha extra proprietary color control crape.....took me forever to get rid of that.

And, I haven't reformatted/clean installed since W95a in 1996....so, reformat isn't an option for me with a stable system.

I like the method of just deleting the old card, swapping cards, booting the pc, and feeding the newest Det. drivers when asked.

Will work.....no?
--Randy