Hey all, I was just wondering if upgrading my processor would F up my Windows installation or anything? I've heard some bad stories where people just change their hardware, and since Windows doesn't recognize it as the hardware you activated it with, it won't start...I REALLY don't feel like talking to MS tech support AGAIN...I already had issues with my activation...took 4.5 hours on the phone to resolve. Anyways, I'm thinking about an upgrade from an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ to an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, considering they're so much cheaper now since it's socket 939. I'm also building a media center PC for the family for Christmas, so I have an excuse to get a new processor, then I'll just give them my current one, which should be more than efficient for media center purposes. Is there anything I can do to stop Windows from going anal upon hardware change, or will it happen at all? Thanks in advance, Cody
No, the cpu isnt that much of a big issue. Windows hates it when bigger bits of hardware is changed, just incase have a look on ur mobo makers site and check that ur mobo is supported for Dual core, if so go ahead. Windows will install the correct drivers for the new cpu as windows sets up for 2cpu's rather than one, when i switched it was propblem free and painless.
Yeah, I bought my mobo knowing that I would probably eventually upgrade to an X2, so it's supported. Thanks for the info! That should make my life so much easier. Cody
Yeah, like atanum said, you shouldn't have any issues upgrading to X2 if your mobo supports dual core.
Just to reiterate what's been said, I upgraded from a FX57 to a FX60 and to be honest, I didn't even notice Windows doing anything... just plugged it in and it worked.. well, after wrestling with my water block for an hour, but that's not really anyone's fault but mine Go for it.
My friend recently did a complete rebuild (new mobo, cpu, videocard, ram) and didn't want to reinstall windows. I told him it would probably boot, but be so F'd up he'd be tackling problems all night. Well lo and behold he boots up and and the "found new hardware" wizard comes up with about 40 billion instances of itself to try and install...everything. So I tell him he better just format and re-install windows. He says "nah." So I, never to question my buddies stubborn ways, tell him to throw in the drivers CD that came with the mobo and told him to have fun looking for all 40 billion drivers on the CD, one by one. Now I know that reinstalling windows takes only a few minutes, but I want him to suffer his own lazyness. The real kicker here, he didn't have his USB drivers (obviously) so he's going through all of the "found new hardware" wizards with JUST his keyboard. Making it impossible to use the driver CDs GUI. So now he HAS to go to the wizard and tell it to search his CD-ROM drive for every single componet, one by one ny one! Alt-tabbing around, and generally taking years to do each one! LOL. So it's around 9pm, I grab my Windows CD which I was going to let him use, and I go on my merry way. It's about a 20 minute drive home. The rain was coming down hard, and since I live in the middle of nowhere, there's no real street lights to speak of. So it's a cold, dark, wet 20 minute drive home. I'm not done taking off my shoes when my phone rings "hey Rick, it's Tom. I'm getting this error saying 'cannot find PCI.sys' I think I need to come pick up your Windows CD. Classic!
... Hi, i've just done the same upgrade you'r proposing. Worked a like a dream. But you might want to get the amd x64 patch for dual core optimization. Doesn't come down as an update. Found that a couple of things, most noteably TOCA 3, played in fast forward. Which his good if you have the reactions of a cat. The manual method is to set the affinity of the program to only use one cpu. D.
lol There's a couple of patches for AMD X2 cpu's, there's an AMD one and one Microsoft did. I can't remember if it's better to have either or both though.
Something really neat happened just recently. I upgraded from a 3700+ on an NF4 Ultra board to a P5N SLI with a Core 2 Duo. After I installed everything, I forgot to go into the BIOS to change the boot settings to boot off my DVD drive for a format reinstall, but Windows XP booted up just fine. After it finished loading I could use most of my programs except games. The switch to Intel didn't do anything funky and I could have simply removed all the old drivers and installed the new stuff. For more possible stability I went ahead and reinstalled. During my last upgrade a year ago, going from 754 AGP (Nforce 3 Ultra) to 939 PCI-E (NForce 4 Ultra) was not nearly as smooth. I forgot to de-authorize my computer for iTunes and could not get into Windows to fix it, even in safe mode!
... Meeoow ... The windows one's are on auto update so that's didn't do anything for me but the AMD one sorted me out ...
