Tips on upgrading MB/CPU

[Shag514]

Setup: 2 year old Lenovo H430 w/ I3 3.4ghz w/1 PCIe, running Win8.1. Upgraded to 8gb corsair vengeance ram, 550 watt cooler master psu, Nvidia GTX 550 Ti GPU.

Really want to upgrade my MB/CPU to an Intel i5/i7 while porting over all my other hardware (HDD, GPU, MEMORY, etc.). My concern is that i'll have proplems with Windows 8.1 being compatable with the new MB/CPU. Is there a way to work around this issue. Any tips on how to make this upgrade easy and safe (don't want to re-format my HDD).

 

[spooky2th]

Try a sysprep.

To do this, go to C:\Windows\System32\Sysprep\sysprep.exe, check 'generalize', select 'OOBE' on drop down menu, and 'Shut down'.

When your new PC boots off of your old HDD, you'll get the 'out of box experience' screen, asking you to create new user account. Just call it anything and after that's done, you can log off and switch to your main user account.

Once you're logged in with your main account, you can safely proceed with deleting the newly made account in Control Panel > User Accounts applet

To clarify what sysprep does, it basicly gets rid of all platform specific data such as drivers and configuration files.

 

[geofelt]

1. You should be able to just change out your i3 cpu for a i5 or i7.
It is lga1155 I think.
That might be a i5-3570 or a i7-3770.

2. If you do change out the motherboard, you have a good chance that windows will boot sufficiently well to just install the new chipset drivers.

3. Take this as an opportunity to convert to a SSD. Clone your hard drive to the new ssd and work with that.
If anything goes wrong, you will still have the original HDD to fall back on.