Changing motherboards Am2 -Am3

howardrmz

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Feb 28, 2014
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I bought a used motherboard and cpu off Ebay.
Motherboard MSI 970A-g46
Cpu AMD FX 6350 (also used came with board)
Also 4 gigs of samsung ram 1600 ddr3
Out of old system ocz vertex 160gb and 1 tb drive
Windows 64 bit ultimate 7
graphics card Powercolor 7850
My question is just swapped everything to what is above and the system booted up and loaded windows, but every now and then the system freeze's in windows or on internet need help? Also noticed that in bio's it's still showing windows 8 from previous owner. How can I change this in bio's?

 
1. Update drivers... your OS is probably running with your AM2 motherboard drivers and you need those for the AM3+ motherboard. The MSI motherboard product page has a link in the support area for driver downloads, or you could use a driver utility like SlimDrivers to update drivers automatically, just remove the utility afterwards or disable all it's automatic functions.

2. Reset the BIOS to force it to recognize the SSD, HDD and your Windows 7 settings such as Power Options settings.

3. Make sure your PSU meets the new components power requirements.
 
It's because you changed motherboards without doing a clean install, either do a clean install or use sysprep and install the correct MB drivers.

You [strike]can't[/strike] probably shouldn't just update the drivers, you have to make sure the old ones are removed as well, sysprep will do that for you or you can do it manually.
 
Regarding the crashing:
Are you re-using your Windows install from a previous build? If so, you shouldn't do that... generally I'd say "never do that" although if your two builds are *VERY* similar you might be able to get away with it. Do a fresh install of your desired flavor of Windows.

If you're running a clean install I'd say that there's a decent chance that some component you purchased on eBay is defective or failing.

Regarding the BIOS:
I'm not familiar with the BIOS on that motherboard. I'd recommend downloading the manual from MSI's website. AFAIK they keep pdf copies of all their motherboard manuals
 
1. The driver utility will update or replace drivers according to the hardware it detects.. you don't have to remove drivers previous drivers.

2. Deffective hardware is a possibility but you first have to see if it can run with the appropriate drivers. The MSI product page has the most recent drivers, manuals, and BIOS software but for different hard drives... which is essetially what you have replaced, updating it should not be a priority but if you feel comfortable updating it, go ahead.
 
The driver utility will ideally/normally remove old drivers as it replaces/updates but I don't know if I would count on that in this situation. They only get removed if the driver is for the same thing (not always true with different hardware) or if the install package is programmed to automatically remove conflicting drivers (also not always true). This is just me recommending the safest method, I'm not saying that it's not potentially overkill.

That said sysprep removes all the drivers that matter so I don't consider it to be any extra work.
 
I do count on that.. done it a number of times and when using a driver utility or updating them manually uninstalls/removes previous drivers.. they are not deleted cause they have to be available for Roolbacks. So, deleting old drivers is not essential... a Windows installation has many drivers for different hardware and only the appropriate drivers are installed and working, so those that are not installed are not interfering in any way, so deleting previous drivers is not essential.

When you allow hardware to be automatically installed, the Plug and Play service looks for drivers from among those that are already in the system. And when you manually install hardware drivers you can select one from a long list of different make and model device drivers that were unloaded from the installation CD/DVD, and drivers that are not in the system are not listed in the manual driver update selection screen.

So, updating drivers or changing similar hardware automatically uninstalls the previous drivers, and you can either delete or keep the previous drivers... it makes no difference. The only need to delete them is to free-up disk space (if they are large enough).