Upgrading gateway system for friend, will Windows stay intact?

[VinY]

My friend wants me to upgrade their system so I had them buy an IWill KK266, a 1GHZ Athlon, 256mb Crucial RAM, and a new power supply, since the old system is a Pentium II 233 and the old power supply probably won't work with the Athlon board. Windows is already installed on the hard drive and is configured for the gateway motherboard/cpu/RAM. When I swap these components, will Windows still function properly or will I have to format the drive and reinstall Windows? Is there any way I can prevent weird errors from happening after I swap the components? Thanks in advance!

 

[VBboy]

LOL

Windows never stays the same.

Seriously, you will need to blow away the OS - but don't format, that the most stupid thing people do. Just copy out Desktop, Favorites and other needed files, then delete \Windows and \Program Files. Note that you cannot perform these deletions from within Windows.

Install the new OS, nice and easy.

 

[VinY]

That is the cleanest way to do it? Seems like a sloppy restore

 

[NelsonMuntz]

What he is suggesting is basically reformatting the hard drive except you don't have the benefit of a completely clean (defragmented) hard drive. If you get rid of those two folders then hardly any of your installed programs will work so you will need to reinstall all of those any way. The only things it will save are the files that they have made during the life of the computer. Some careful questions and investigations s/b able to allow you to ascertain where they save most of their files. There s/b just a few places like "My Documents" and a few other folders along with say quicken folders and things like that. Back those up, format the hard drive and reinstall the operating system and all the programs they had on there. Make sure you have the original installation disks of any programs they want reinstalled.

 

[VinY]

Damn. So there's real no way of just swapping the parts and having it work again...it needs to be formatted?

 

[bozo1]

If you are using Windows 98 or Me, all you have to do is boot into safe mode, go into the registry and delete the HKLM/Enum subtree. On reboot, Windows will redetect all of your hardware, old and new. You will need to have the drivers ready for any hardware that Windows doesn't have a driver for.

 

[VBboy]

bozo1,

That is a very dirty way to do it. All drivers will remain on the system, they will just not be "used" anymore. That leaves behind megabytes of DLLs and VXDs as well as other driver-related files. Also, some drivers use other registry Keys to store user's preferences, etc, and your registry will remain quite bloated.

My way works best, especially for people who cannot back up a few gigabytes of My Documents and other files..

 

[bigbootydaddy]

you can swap, but 99.9 percent it will start to go screwy right away.

99.9% booty

 

[bozo1]

I agree that it is not the best way to do it but it is an option if someone doesn't want to reinstall Winders and it does work.