[SOLVED] Upgrading Motherboard, CPU and RAM

[mcastro199]

Current System Specs

Motherboard: Asus F2A55-M
CPU: AMD A8
RAM: 8gb
Power: Corsair 650w Bronze
GPU: GTX 1070 Founders Edition
SSD: Samsung Evo 500gb
HDD: 1TB

So for obvious reasons i need to replace my motherboard, cpu and memory.

My brother has a brand new MSI z170a M5 with Corsair Vengeance 16gb RAM laying around that he wasnt using so I decided to take it from him.

I bought a i5-7600 to pair it with but I need to update the BIOS in order for it to work.

I have a computer here at work with an i5-6400 that I can use to update the BIOS.

My question is...

How should I go about this?

I want to keep all the data thats on my computer right now. I just want to upgrade the components.

Should I just put the computer together and upgrade the BIOS with the CPU from my work computer and then install the new CPU?

Should I back up my OS on a flash drive?

Not really sure the exact steps that I should take to do this without harming my equipment.

Someone please help!

 

[clutchc]

First, do a complete disk image (backup) for sure.
I seriously doubt you'll be able to use your existing OS and pgms when you swap boards. I suspect the boot will fail. The change from the AMD platform to the Intel platform is too drastic. You'll be looking at a clean install of the OS and all your pgms and data.

Win 10 or Win7? Win 10 allows for moving to anew platform a couple times and still keeping the license (activation), but Win 7 doesn't. There are work-arounds for W7, but they are iffy.

 

[mcastro199]

First, do a complete disk image (backup) for sure.
I seriously doubt you'll be able to use your existing OS and pgms when you swap boards. I suspect the boot will fail. The change from the AMD platform to the Intel platform is too drastic. You'll be looking at a clean install of the OS and all your pgms and data.

Win 10 or Win7? Win 10 allows for moving to anew platform a couple times and still keeping the license (activation), but Win 7 doesn't. There are work-arounds for W7, but they are iffy.

I have Windows 10. So how do I do that move?

 

[clutchc]

First, do a complete disk image (backup) for sure.
I seriously doubt you'll be able to use your existing OS and pgms when you swap boards. I suspect the boot will fail. The change from the AMD platform to the Intel platform is too drastic. You'll be looking at a clean install of the OS and all your pgms and data.

Win 10 or Win7? Win 10 allows for moving to anew platform a couple times and still keeping the license (activation), but Win 7 doesn't. There are work-arounds for W7, but they are iffy.

I have Windows 10. So how do I do that move?

What I meant by 'move' was a legal move. You can install W10 to the new board (fresh install) and use the same product key to re-activate it that you used with the old board.
If your old board was from an OEM installation like a Dell or HP, you may not get the new installation activated.
Bottom line, you'll need to do a clean install either way.

 

[mcastro199]

First, do a complete disk image (backup) for sure.
I seriously doubt you'll be able to use your existing OS and pgms when you swap boards. I suspect the boot will fail. The change from the AMD platform to the Intel platform is too drastic. You'll be looking at a clean install of the OS and all your pgms and data.

Win 10 or Win7? Win 10 allows for moving to anew platform a couple times and still keeping the license (activation), but Win 7 doesn't. There are work-arounds for W7, but they are iffy.

I have Windows 10. So how do I do that move?

What I meant by 'move' was a legal move. You can install W10 to the new board (fresh install) and use the same product key to re-activate it that you used with the old board.
If your old board was from an OEM installation like a Dell or HP, you may not get the new installation activated.
Bottom line, you'll need to do a clean install either way.

Actually, so... I was able to just go ahead and put the whole computer together. I plugged everything in and was able to boot windows. I had to get rid of some stuff with the new install but i kept all the important stuff.

I used the program "ProduKey" before taking apart my old computer to get the Windows BIOS OEM Product Key and the Windows 10 home product key.

after it i got into my new computer it kept saying that my windows was not activated but I put in the OEM BIOS key through my microsoft account and it started working normally.

 

[clutchc]

That is because those product key finding pgms were written for Win7. Win 10 uses a different method of encrypting the key in BIOS. The key returned with those pgms is bogus. If you have a Microsoft Account and your key is registered to the account, it should allow the move at least once.

Was this old build one you put together from retail parts or was it a pre-built PC?
Btw... I'm kinda shocked that the old Win 10 installation was able to boot in the new machine. I suspect it did a fresh upgrade as it was booting. Did it take awhile to boot?

 

[mcastro199]

That is because those product key finding pgms were written for Win7. Win 10 uses a different method of encrypting the key in BIOS. The key returned with those pgms is bogus. If you have a Microsoft Account and your key is registered to the account, it should allow the move at least once.

Was this old build one you put together from retail parts or was it a pre-built PC?
Btw... I'm kinda shocked that the old Win 10 installation was able to boot in the new machine. I suspect it did a fresh upgrade as it was booting. Did it take awhile to boot?

So about 4 years ago I bought an already built Asus office PC and slowly upgraded it until I ran into the problem of upgrading my GPU and having my A8 cpu bottleneck the performance. My brother had extra motherboard that he had laying around so I decided to just upgrade it all.

No not at all. The whole process only took me about 30 minutes in total to get everything running. Then after I finished I was able to update the BIOS on my board to support my new Kaby Lake cpu. So all in all it took about 1 hour.

Honestly, Im loving it too. The performance boost is unreal compared to my last computer.