Windows XP and upgrading a motherboard

[tornadobox]

I was just thinking about this and thought I'd throw it out to you guys too...

Since Windows XP has that "nice" new activation thingy, what would be the best way to install a new motherboard to your system? Because the XP activation stays on the hard drive, I would think that formatting the hard drive would not be what you'd want to do.

I was thinking this, if you were to install the new motherboard, install all the new drivers and stuff for it...then run defrag...would that eleviate many of the problems had by switching motherboards on a hard drive with an already installed OS? I'm wondering because I just ordered XP home, and might want to upgrade to the KT266a chipset in the near future.

Thanks.

 

[CStroman]

I posted pretty much the same question somewhere, but I can't remember whether it was in here or in motherboards.

 

[patsun123]

the activation thing on XP, to my knowledge at least, isnt really gonna be a big deal for those people who actually have and own windows XP legally. All it does is encode your hardware into one long string and sends it to MS... and when u get new hardware, it just asks you to re-code that string again to send it in... not really affecting anything else pertaining to whether formatting a HD with a new mobo is good or not.

i dont really know what running defrag will do to help alleviate in switching mobo's... its always been my experience to format with a new mobo no matter the operating system... but then again i dont switch mobo's that often.

i guess my point is, dont worry about the activation if you have XP legally, and just treat WinXP like u would any other OS in terms of hardware.