Quick & Dirty, (and LAZY,) MB Upgrade?

[Gyro1949]

Hi All,

I’ve got a “homemade” PC with a Jetway 845EDAK motherboard. It’s got a 2.4GHz Pentium-4 Processor. It’s over four years old, now. Maybe over five…I can’t recall.

I want to upgrade the board to something newer, with better drivers, and faster CPU, hopefully to avoid some of the infrequent, (supposedly driver-related,) Blue Screens of Death my Windows XP Pro-SP2 has been suffering.

I have two perfectly good hard drives that use Ultra ATA-133, and the board has two separate IDE Interfaces for the drives. I have no buffering problem creating CDs from anything on my hard drives, or from the DVD to the CD-RW drive. I’d like to keep those the same way, so my choice will be a MB with two Ultra ATA-133 Interfaces, as well. (I’m thinking ASUS or Intel.)

What I’m wondering about is the problems I might face if I just change the MB, and plug in my hard drives. I’m expecting that booting with the old hard drives will be a problem, because they’ll have, of course, all the old MB drivers on them.

Has anyone gone this route to do an upgrade, without having to go through an entire OS re-installation? Is it even possible to do what I’m hoping I can do?

Please let me know.

If worse comes to worse, I’ll wait out the expectable alterations and SPs to Vista, and do a Vista install on the hard drives, after Vista’s proven stable. Then it’d be worth the hassle of re-installing all my applications.

Thanks,
Gyro1949

 

[Scout]

With an XP installation that old, I'd go ahead and do a clean install. But if you really can't stand reloading everyting, you can go ahead and hook up your old hard drives to the new board and let it boot.

Depending on the IDE controller on the old board versus the new board, it'll either boot up and re-identify all the hardware on the new board, or it'll blue screen and you'll have to plug in the XP CDROM and do a reinstall. During that reinstall you'll have an option to install over your old XP installation (do NOT do a clean install) and that will preserve your old software. You will however have to re-activate Windows in any case.

 

[jedi940]

However, if you change too many system components, windows will think it is a new computer (by new i mean second) and will require you to re-register it. A clean install my be necessary after all

 

[Gyro1949]

Scout,

Thanks! But the install on this system isn’t that old. I changed hard drives about six months ago, after some repeated CRASH problems caused me to have to clean re-install a few times. That’s one reason I was hoping to not have to do that.

The MB is what’s kind of old. And I think that it may be why I’m starting to get occasional Blue Screens of Death, saying a driver’s at fault, or once in a while the “Stop Error” screens. I haven’t added new drivers for anything. I’m guessing that one or more of the MS updates may have pushed the OS past the ability of the MB to cope.

This MB has an Ultra ATA-133 IDE Interface, and that required that a driver be added during the OS install. The board I’ll choose will also have the same ATA-133 Interface. So you’re right. I might end up having to do a “Repair.” I would hope that that would avoid my having to deal with all the associated software updates and patches.

Of course, if I do wait for Vista to come up to speed, a clean install of that would alleviate all my hopes, and cause me to go through all the updates and patches, anyway. At least it’d be new software that may avoid the occasional Blue Screen of Death.

“Gyro1949”

 

[Gyro1949]

Jedi941,

You bring up a good point. I’ve only previously changed Wi-Fi cards, and hard drives with this particular OEM XP Pro. So far, none of that tripped the “alarm.”

Do you know how many changes XP allows before thinking you’re stealing an OS, and won’t allow re-registration? I’m guessing what you say is right…It WILL look to be a whole new computer.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t MS been fairly flexible with such problems? I thought I heard that you can reason with them, and they’d allow you to re-register.

Or, is that fault with the software CD, and not at MS?

“Gyro1949”