Howdy! I'm about to perform a fairly major hardware upgrade on my PC and would like your recommendations for configuring Windows so that all is well after the change. Currently I'm running a A8nSLI mobo, Athlon 4200+ (socket 939), 2Gb DDR-400, 8800GT and Windows XP Home installed on a SATA drive. I have another SATA drive connected with games, Steam, documents, music, etc... I'll be changing to a P6TSE, i7-920, 3Gb DDR3 RAM, etc... Can I just go ahead and upgrade, connect the existing hard discs, and boot up as normal? I was going to disable the AMD dual core optimiser/driver but will I need to do anything else? Many thanks in advance. Cleggy.
Hey welcome to the forum! From my experience, you'll need to change the drivers for your new mobo and any other new hardware that would require drivers, i.e gfx card, sound card etc. Also if you change more than 3 pieces of major hardware you'll need to reactivate windows within 3 days. So make sure you have your licence key handy. I would recommend un-installing all the drivers for the hardware you're going to change and then installing the new ones after everything's working. R_M
Pretty much as Radical suggests - uninstall as many drivers as possible (and have a restart inbetween so that it boots with no drivers installed, just to be sure there's nothing left), then hope. It won't always work, so do backups of everything and make sure you've got all the relevant program files etc first.
Agreed. Take off all drivers first, then rebuild and finally reinstall the drivers. Don't forget that the XP CD also has a windows repair option that can be useful if all else fails. Personally with a major rebuild like this I do a fresh install anyway but that's just my preference!
Thanks folks, I've decided that a completely fresh installation will be best, new HDD ordered and installation discs ready!
