Is an OS reinstall always necessary after a cpu/mobo upgrade?
For all of my system building life i've been under the impression that whenever you upgrade a motherboard and cpu you have to install the OS fresh with the new hardware. Most of the time, the new hardware won't even boot to windows without crashing if you don't.
Yesterday, i replaced my girlfriend's E8400 Wolfdale and 775 motherboard (running XP 32-bit) with a Sandy Bridge i5 2500k and socket 1155 motherboard. I booted it up intending just to look at the BIOS a bit before reinstalling XP but didn't hit F1 in time. To my surprise, XP booted up just fine. Sure there was a lot of whining about missing drivers but after i installed them everything seems normal.
My question is whether or not i'm not fully optimized behind the scenes since the OS installation didn't "calibrate" with the new hardware when it was installed. If everything should be fine the way it is I might have lucked out since this motherboard doesn't have an IDE connector or and floppy connector which would make installing SATA drivers during XP installation a bit....impossible.
Yesterday, i replaced my girlfriend's E8400 Wolfdale and 775 motherboard (running XP 32-bit) with a Sandy Bridge i5 2500k and socket 1155 motherboard. I booted it up intending just to look at the BIOS a bit before reinstalling XP but didn't hit F1 in time. To my surprise, XP booted up just fine. Sure there was a lot of whining about missing drivers but after i installed them everything seems normal.
My question is whether or not i'm not fully optimized behind the scenes since the OS installation didn't "calibrate" with the new hardware when it was installed. If everything should be fine the way it is I might have lucked out since this motherboard doesn't have an IDE connector or and floppy connector which would make installing SATA drivers during XP installation a bit....impossible.
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