Changing MB and GPU!!!

T-LAM-CT-LAM-C The Old-English "D"
edited May 2006 in Hardware
Hello, folks, its been a while for me, but here goes: Im finally making the jump to PCIe. (I know, drag me kicking and screaming into the nineties, why dont you!) Anyway, I can get by with replacing my MB and graphics board only, as my CPU, PSU and RAM will be retained for the time being. My question is, can I possibly move my C: drive with this big change? I would like to avoid reloading windows with all of my apps etc. My specs are:

From:
GA-K8NSUltra-939 NForce 3
Athlon 64 3200 Winchester
1GB OCZ 3500 Performance 433
Enermax NoiseTaker 420w PSU
GeForce 6600GT AGP
2x 100GB SATA HDD JBOD

To:
ASUS A8N-E NForce 4
Same Proc
Same RAM
Same PSU
GeForce 7600GT PCIe
Same HDD

A clean install may work wonders for me but I do have a lot of nifty apps running. Thanx, folks!

Comments

  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited May 2006
    Assuming being stuck in the nineties doesn't mean that you're running Win98 :vimp: , a Repair Install of WinXP should work:
    To do a Repair Install:

    1) Make sure the bios is set so your cdrom drive is the first boot device.

    2) Put your WinXP CD in the drive, start the computer, then watch for a line like "Press any key to boot from CD".

    3) Continue as if it were a clean install, until it gets to the point where it finds your existing Windows installation.

    4) Pick the option to repair the current Windows installation, not add another one.

    5) The rest is automatic.
  • T-LAM-CT-LAM-C The Old-English "D"
    edited May 2006
    Prof, thanx much for your input. I did upgrade my system and started windows without winxp in the drive and the system recognized the old HDD and posted and booted up. It gave me a bunch of "Found New Hardware" alerts to which I was prompted to insert the new driver CD and everything installed perfectly! My system is leaner and a bit meaner. Current specs are:

    A8N-E Motherboard
    eVGA GeForce 7600GT PCIe 600MHz Core/800MHZ Mem.
    PCIe Bus @ 100MHz
    Athlon64 3200+ Winchester @ 2.4 GHz (240 x 10)
    HTT Bus @ 1920MHz (240 x 4(x 2))
    OCZ35001024PLDC-K @ 480MHZ
    Enermax Noizetaker 420w PSU
    2x 100Gb SATA 150 HDDs
    Windows XP Pro. SP2

    This seems stable, Ive played Ghost Recon 3 for some time with no issues, Ive only added .0125v to the CPU Core and thinking about dropping it back to 1.4. Thanx again for your help, I would have been pondering this move for a month.
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited May 2006
    Sounds good. :)

    One last step would be to go into Device Manager, click View>>Show hidden devices, then uninstall all the hardware from the old system. The items should be greyed out - make sure you don't accidently remove any of the new stuff.
  • rapturerapture
    edited May 2006
    Chipset drivers might cause a few problems. Have some ready to install and clean out what you can of the old ones before transfering to the new mobo.

    Repair install as profdlp suggested will save you a lot of grief though.
Sign In or Register to comment.