Upgrading Motherboard and processor

[Craig Tucker]

I am going to upgrade my 1gig PIII and soltek 65-jvb m/board for an epox 8k7a+ motherboard with a athlon 1800+xp.

I am keeping my hard drives, a maxtor 30gb for operating system and progs, and a 40gb maxtor and 120gb IBM for video capture and storage.

What I want to know is, do I need to reinstall all my software when I change my MB. I know they will still be on my hard drive, but what about driver installation system registry and general windows configuration. The plan is to also upgrade to Windows XP pro.

In the past when I have upgraded MB and processor, I have started from scratch and reinstalled all of my software which is very time consuming, I just want to know if it is necessary.

Craig

[menace]

cool pic! I just did exactly what you described and no i didn't have to re-install the OS. I run 98 so things are a little different, but all i did was remove all the old hardware from the sytem seetings before shitting down, swapped them out and booted back up--windows recognized that there was new stuff, asked for drivers and voila up and running. i did have to install generic windows drivers just to get things up and running--namely the CDROM, but after that, everything went smooth.

Of course with XP you may have to get Bill gates' personal permission to do that

[Craig Tucker]

I'm not planning on changing any of my hardware apart from the motherboard and processor

[TheInformer]

I always do a complete re-install of Win9x whenever I swap motherboards.

Is it necessary? Can't answer that one.

My thoughts are that a new install makes sure there are no system files left that were specific to the older mobo. Can you be sure you got rid of every .DLL file (for example) that was used by your older mobo? I can't.

When I upgrades from Win v3.1 to Win95, I did a complete re-install. My thinking then was that I didn't want to build a new structure on top of an existing one - I wanted to know for sure what I was building on.

Just my two cents....

[psycaz]

You may want to re-install the operating system to ensure it registers the chip instruction sets correctly ie 3d Now and SSE. The operating system will adjust itself on install for the type of processor you have install. If you do not do a fresh install, it may not correct itself for 3d Now, since those instructuions are not on the P3. Same as I am not sure if the entire SSE instruction set is supported on the athlon xp so you may notice some programs running a little weird.