I love Windows XP!

[Chris Blount]

Today I decided to purchase a new motherboard and faster processor for my computer running Windows XP. Under normal circumstances I would wipe the hard drive clean and reload Windows after the upgrade. This time though I wanted to find out what would happen if I simply booted from the same partition after the upgrade.

Well, I'm here to tell you. Everything worked perfectly! Windows XP found all of the new hardware and set everything up without any intervention whatsoever. It was amazing! Windows 98 could never do this. I will eventually reload the operating system but for now everything works just much faster (I went from a 750MHZ AMD Athlon to a AMD 2100 XP).

Just wanted to let you guys know so if you are thinking about upgrading to a faster system, you do NOT have to reload Windows XP (although it still is a good idea).

[TNGTony]

Chris,

Glad to hear this. I plan to eventually do the same. I'm currently running a P3 700MHz chip on a motherboard that doesn't recognize memory chips larger than 128MB. XP is running very well, but I want to bump it up to 2.5 or better.

Thanks for the report!

See ya
Tony

[firephoto]

Wow
I would have figured that the two big hardware changes would have made XP thrown a fit and figured you had put the drive in another computer in an atempt to pirate another copy. Maybe that's yet to come. ;)

[Chris Blount]

Originally posted by firephoto
Wow
I would have figured that the two big hardware changes would have made XP thrown a fit and figured you had put the drive in another computer in an atempt to pirate another copy. Maybe that's yet to come. ;) Actually the major hardware changes triggered the WinXP product activation. For some reason it wouldn't work over the internet so I had to call them. I received an automated voice that gave me the new code. After that, all was well.

[Mike123abc]

Service Pack 1 should give you 72 hours to connect to get the upgrade key now. This way you can fix your IP settings to talk over the internet before having to register. Prior to SP1 you had to call and get a new key if you changed hardware too much since it would not configure the internet connection before wanting the license key. After SP1 I was able to make major changes, and it booted, came up to desktop, then was able to contact Microsoft and relicense itself.

[Danny R]

you do NOT have to reload Windows XP

After doing a number of motherboard swaps, I'm pretty sure this is not a universal truth. It all depends on exactly which drivers need to be reinstalled.

If you do have trouble, doing a boot from the CD and reinstall has always fixed it for me. With the reinstall its possible to keep all the old settings so you don't lose programs/etc.

[Chris Blount]

Originally posted by Danny R
you do NOT have to reload Windows XP

After doing a number of motherboard swaps, I'm pretty sure this is not a universal truth. It all depends on exactly which drivers need to be reinstalled.
That is true and I should have put something in my initial post that your mileage may vary. I guess I was cought up in the moment.

We have 2 computers and after upgrading mine I took the old motherboard, chip, sound card and a few other things and upgraded my kids computer which also runs WinXP on a 500 MHZ AMD K6-2 (very slow yuck!). I had the exact same results with their computer. No problems or driver reloads.

[gcutler]

This is all Plug'n'Play in action, as long as the drivers are included in XP, you are alot better off than if they are not included. You may want to check your Hardware Device Manager to make sure you don't see any "X" or "!". The machine may work fine with the driver problems (at least look fine) but you want to get rid of any ! or X in the Device Manager Listing. You may also want to apply any drivers that came with the motherboard as they may be newer than XP (or maybe they are older which you don't want).

That Benefit has existed as far back as Win95, but depending on what hardware you were using and how much older the OS was than the Hardware the more problematic it issue. XP being the newest OS, the greater the chance of success (especially if not a bleeding edge piece of hardware)

I moved a hard drive with Win2000 from a Dell Dimension 4100 to a Dimension 4550 (very different machines, especially mother board wise and while everything worked ok (booted fine, etc), until I updated the motherboard drivers (PCI Bridge, to name one I remember), Video and Audio, etc I was working on borrowed time.

What is cool is that most OSes will work that way (as long as they have access to the appropriate drivers) Win, Mac, Linux, etc.

As long as you have the right drivers (installed via the driver CD or picking "Update Driver"button from the Device Manager screen) you should never have to reinstall the OS. But if the OS was not clean to begin with or was starting to give problems better off from scratch (to get rid of years of junk or just to remove all the settings that don't make a differenc anymore)

[Neil Derryberry]

just a friendly reminder... I can buy computer parts wholesale including cpu's, motherboards, memory and the like - I'd love to give anyone a price quote!