Windows Is this supposed to be possible...?

I just got finished putting together my new Core 2 Machine (woo!), with a few recycled parts. It's got a Gigabyte EP45-UD3R, a Core 2 E5200, an MSI HD 4850 (512MB), 4 gigs of DDR2 and a hard drive yanked from a Gigabyte K8VM800M, with 1 Gigabyte of DDR and an AMD Sempron 3100+. It booted to windows XP the first time I turned it on, with the only negative to show for it is WGA demanding I reactivate for significantly changed hardware.

Is this Windows actually supposed to work like this?

 

i think that you can change things like graphics/harddrive/memory etc but if you change the motherboard then, windows wants you to reactivate as technically it is viewed as a different computer

 

Seeing that the motherboard is from the same company the driver seems to be close enough to work. Reactivation for windows is necessary but everything else should work out of the box with windows

 

It's "safer" to remove old drivers before changing hardware but you may get away without if the new hardware is similar.

How to swap the mobo without an XP re-install has a good section on cleaning out the crap.

 

you're lucky. i've had smaller changes than that give me the "verifying DMI pool data failed" message and had to reinstall.