Upgrading hardware while keeping Windows XP

[RedSheraton]

I'm running Windows XP Home OEM on a Pentium 3 800 system

I'm thinking of upgrading to an Athlon64 3000 Venice skt 939 and either
A8N-E or A8N-SLI and a Radeon X300 or X600 PCI-E graphics card. I know
to backup all my data on the HDD before switching hardware. My question
is will I be OK with the current installation of Win XP Home OEM on the
hard drive or is it best (or even absolutely necessary) when upgrading
the mainboard, CPU and graphics card to do a complete reinstall of
Windows XP?

 

[SNC]

most definitely... reformat... reinstall... clean out the old dll and other
system files...
yes, you will have to get a new activation key from the anti-christ...
oops... microsoft, but the clean install will be well worth it...

SNC

 

[DaveW]

Whenever you change the motherboard in a computer that's runnign XP as the
OS, you MUST reformat the harddrive and do a fresh install of the OS.
Otherwise you will have nasty ongoing Registry errors and data corruption.
(If it will even boot...)

 

[stevem]

Whenever you change the motherboard in a computer that's runnign XP as the
OS, you MUST reformat the harddrive and do a fresh install of the OS.
Otherwise you will have nasty ongoing Registry errors and data corruption.
(If it will even boot...)

Sorry, I feel I must step in here to say that that is c**p! I have recently
successfully changed from a P4B266 to a P5AD2E-Premium, including going from
a P42.2 to a P43.4 (550) processor, and moving to DDR2 memory, WITHOUT
having to reformat/reinstall. The critical point is to remember to remove as
many board-specific drivers as possible (i.e., IDE, etc) and let the board
revert to the XP-generic drivers. This must, of course, be done BEFORE
removing the original board. I will admit I did have the added luxury of
having two drives to play with, such that I was able to retain the original
drive for the P4B266, and clone it (using Norton Ghost) to the drive I was
going to use to boot the P5AD2E-Premium. Then, I simply booted the P4B266 on
the new drive, reverted everything I could find to the inbuilt XP drivers,
installed the P5AD2E-Premium, booted on that, and installed the new drivers.
The main advantage, of course, is that I did NOT need to re-install the
multitude of applications I already had installed (OK, I obviously had to
reactivate XP and Office, but you get three days to reactivate XP, so you
have plenty of time to get things straightened out before doing so.) Please
stop giving dodgy advice!

Steve.

 

[NoNoBadDog!]

Whenever you change the motherboard in a computer that's runnign XP as the
OS, you MUST reformat the harddrive and do a fresh install of the OS.
Otherwise you will have nasty ongoing Registry errors and data corruption.
(If it will even boot...)

**************W R O N G **************W R O N G****************

A simple repair installation will be sufficient, provided the disc being
used is not a bios locked OEM disc.

You *DO NOT* have to wipe your drive an reinstall just because of a
motherboard swap.

Bobby

 

[Tim]

Do a repair on 1st boot next time. That is [part of] what it is for.

For instructions, go to www.michaelstevenstech.com

- Tim

 

[stevem]

Do a repair on 1st boot next time. That is [part of] what it is for.

For instructions, go to www.michaelstevenstech.com

- Tim

Sorry, I feel I must step in here to say that that is c**p! I have
recently successfully changed from a P4B266 to a P5AD2E-Premium,
including going from a P42.2 to a P43.4 (550) processor, and moving to
DDR2 memory, WITHOUT having to reformat/reinstall. The critical point is
to remember to remove as many board-specific drivers as possible (i.e.,
IDE, etc) and let the board revert to the XP-generic drivers. This must,
of course, be done BEFORE removing the original board. I will admit I did
have the added luxury of having two drives to play with, such that I was
able to retain the original drive for the P4B266, and clone it (using
Norton Ghost) to the drive I was going to use to boot the P5AD2E-Premium.
Then, I simply booted the P4B266 on the new drive, reverted everything I
could find to the inbuilt XP drivers, installed the P5AD2E-Premium,
booted on that, and installed the new drivers. The main advantage, of
course, is that I did NOT need to re-install the multitude of
applications I already had installed (OK, I obviously had to reactivate
XP and Office, but you get three days to reactivate XP, so you have
plenty of time to get things straightened out before doing so.) Please
stop giving dodgy advice!

Steve.

Tim,

You are, of course, perfectly correct in what you say. In fact, my first
attempt was exactly as you suggest. I even had an SP2 slipstreamed CD in
place. Unfortunately, I came up against a problem I have seen mentioned on
Google groups, and even on the MS KB - after initial loading of the system,
then reboot, I found that my keyboard and mouse were completely inoperative.
XP reported that it could not find the CD drive. MS KB suggests hitting F10,
followed by various arcane incantations - but precisely how one achieves
this WITH A COMPLETELY INOPERATIVE KEYBOARD is beyond me! That is why I did
what I did re reverting to XP's native drivers. Curiously, both Google
groups and MS KB insisted that this inoperative keyboard/mouse issue could
be resolved by hitting various keys - I can only conclude that no-one
actually reads these posts properly! I still have no idea why the
keyboard/mouse were inoperative - I even went so far as to revert
keyboard/mouse drivers to native XP, and use standard PS/2 keyboard/mouse,
but it didn't make any difference - both still inoperative. Fortunately,
going back to native XP drivers solved the problem.

Steve.

 

[Bob Knowlden]

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html

There are two types of issues: software and ethical/legal.

From the software viewpoint, you will need to perform a repair install of XP
on the new system as a minimum, so that the correct drivers for the
mainboard will be installed. A clean installation might be better, but it'd
be rather more work.

From the ethical/legal stand, a retail OEM license is not supposed to be
transferable to a new machine, at least in the USA. I doubt that changing
from a PIII mainboard and CPU to an A64 system would be regarded by
Microsoft as a "repair". If your OEM copy of XP isn't a retail version, it
may not be possible to use it on another type of mainboard; it could be BIOS
locked.

The least expensive robust option would be to obtain a retail upgrade
version of XP. You can do anything with the upgrade version that the full
version would support, if you can produce "qualifying media" (I use a CD-R
copy of my retail Win98 Gold upgrade CD). In the US, the cost is less than
$100.

HTH.

Bob Knowlden

Address may be scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.

 

[magus kent]

I'm running Windows XP Home OEM on a Pentium 3 800 system

I'm thinking of upgrading to an Athlon64 3000 Venice skt 939 and either
A8N-E or A8N-SLI and a Radeon X300 or X600 PCI-E graphics card. I know
to backup all my data on the HDD before switching hardware. My question
is will I be OK with the current installation of Win XP Home OEM on the
hard drive or is it best (or even absolutely necessary) when upgrading
the mainboard, CPU and graphics card to do a complete reinstall of
Windows XP?

Check out this link:

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x/a/tpc/f/77909774/m/1400925745

 

[Joe Doe]

(OK, I obviously had to
reactivate XP and Office, but you get three days to reactivate XP, so you
have plenty of time to get things straightened out before doing so.) Please
stop giving dodgy advice!

Steve.

Was the reactivation processed automatically via the internet or did you
have to call in for the reactivation?

Roland

 

[stevem]

Was the reactivation processed automatically via the internet or did you
have to call in for the reactivation?

Roland

It was done automatically over internet, because the last re-activation was
more than the requisite 90 or 120 days beforehand (has anyone actually got
genuine information on this?). When you activate (or re-activate) a product,
Microsoft's database effectively 'resets' after either 90 or 120 days, so
you can re-activate automatically. It's only when you have to re-activate
within this period that you have to call in. In my experience, when I've had
to reactivate within this period, there has never been any 'inquisition'
about why I'm doing it; I've simply had to recite a ridiculously long string
to them, and then type an equally ridiculously long string dictated by
Microsoft. In fact, the last time I had to do this, there was no 'human'
interface at all, it was all done via a 'robot' system.
Steve.

 

[Triffid]

Sorry, I feel I must step in here to say that that is c**p! I have recently
successfully changed from a P4B266 to a P5AD2E-Premium, including going from
a P42.2 to a P43.4 (550) processor, and moving to DDR2 memory, WITHOUT
having to reformat/reinstall. The critical point is to remember to remove as
many board-specific drivers as possible (i.e., IDE, etc) and let the board
revert to the XP-generic drivers. This must, of course, be done BEFORE
removing the original board. I will admit I did have the added luxury of
having two drives to play with, such that I was able to retain the original
drive for the P4B266, and clone it (using Norton Ghost) to the drive I was
going to use to boot the P5AD2E-Premium. Then, I simply booted the P4B266 on
the new drive, reverted everything I could find to the inbuilt XP drivers,
installed the P5AD2E-Premium, booted on that, and installed the new drivers.
The main advantage, of course, is that I did NOT need to re-install the
multitude of applications I already had installed (OK, I obviously had to
reactivate XP and Office, but you get three days to reactivate XP, so you
have plenty of time to get things straightened out before doing so.) Please
stop giving dodgy advice!

Steve.

Most people here have learned to ignore DaveW - he's almost always dead
wrong, and adds no value even when partially correct. You won't miss
anything by plonking all top-posters here.

Triffid

 

[CraigNJ]

FWIW, doing a fresh install every couple of years can be a good idea
for a completely different reason: it's a way to ensure that you
don't carry forward any viruses, spyware, and old programs that you'd
just as soon not have cluttering up your system anymore, and also ones
that didn't completely uninstall.

Craig

 

[Zeneca]

Better than a complete reinstall, make a backup once you've finis the fresh
installation and load it again when you find the system heavy.

 

[Clive Lumb]

I'm running Windows XP Home OEM on a Pentium 3 800 system

I'm thinking of upgrading to an Athlon64 3000 Venice skt 939 and
either A8N-E or A8N-SLI and a Radeon X300 or X600 PCI-E graphics
card. I know to backup all my data on the HDD before switching
hardware. My question is will I be OK with the current installation
of Win XP Home OEM on the hard drive or is it best (or even
absolutely necessary) when upgrading the mainboard, CPU and graphics
card to do a complete reinstall of Windows XP?

OK. So I've read the whole thread.. and nobody is totally correct.

Firstly, on the principle/practicality of swapping a MB.
Yes, if you delete everything that mentions VIA (or INTEL or NVIDIA etc.)
from the hardware list - plus the graphics card and any integrated network
cards, plus the sound chip - WITHOUT REBOOTING (and if you've remembered to
use a PS/2 mouse not a USB one since it stops working as soon as you delete
the VIA(or other) USB controller)
- THEN replace any branded IDE driver by the Microsoft standard IDE driver
- AND if you're not booting of some esoteric SATA or SCSI drive
- THEN stop the computer and swap the M/B
It should work 9 times out of 10.
The repair procedure is generally only necessary if you need to change the
HAL (hardware abstraction layer, not the computer from 2001 A Space
Odyssey), for example if going from mono to multi-processor or vice-versa,
or if ACPI was not activated on the previous board.

HOWEVER :
A format & re-install is generally better for the following reasons
- Cleans up spywares, virii etc.
- New clean set of DLLs
- And the one that Microsoft denies... Windows has timing issues if you take
too great a step in processor speed or if you change processor technology
(AMD/INTEL). Your system might run OK most of the time, but you can have
strange bugs, random reboots etc.

In Red's case, going from a P3 to an Athlon 64, I would highly reccommend
starting from 0.

Thanks for listening
Clive

 

[Gert B. Frob]

OK. So I've read the whole thread.. and nobody is totally correct.

Firstly, on the principle/practicality of swapping a MB.
Yes, if you delete everything that mentions VIA (or INTEL or NVIDIA etc.)
from the hardware list - plus the graphics card and any integrated network
cards, plus the sound chip - WITHOUT REBOOTING (and if you've remembered to
use a PS/2 mouse not a USB one since it stops working as soon as you delete
the VIA(or other) USB controller)
- THEN replace any branded IDE driver by the Microsoft standard IDE driver
- AND if you're not booting of some esoteric SATA or SCSI drive
- THEN stop the computer and swap the M/B
It should work 9 times out of 10.
The repair procedure is generally only necessary if you need to change the
HAL (hardware abstraction layer, not the computer from 2001 A Space
Odyssey), for example if going from mono to multi-processor or vice-versa,
or if ACPI was not activated on the previous board.

HOWEVER :
A format & re-install is generally better for the following reasons
- Cleans up spywares, virii etc.
- New clean set of DLLs
- And the one that Microsoft denies... Windows has timing issues if you take
too great a step in processor speed or if you change processor technology
(AMD/INTEL). Your system might run OK most of the time, but you can have
strange bugs, random reboots etc.

In Red's case, going from a P3 to an Athlon 64, I would highly reccommend
starting from 0.

Thanks for listening
Clive

Really? The system I'm using now has gone from a P-4 1.8 to 2.6 to 3.2
(all Northwood). No "timing" issues here. As a matter of fact, I went from
2100 ram to 3200 after updating to the 3.2 processor. What are you talking
about?

 

[Clive Lumb]

Really? The system I'm using now has gone from a P-4 1.8 to 2.6 to
3.2 (all Northwood). No "timing" issues here. As a matter of fact,
I went from 2100 ram to 3200 after updating to the 3.2 processor.
What are you talking about?

I'm talking about experience...
In Red's case he is proposing to go from a 800 MHz Intel platform to a 3000+
64 bit AMD - a much bigger speed step than yours, plus a technology change
from Intel to AMD, plus a chipset change from probably Intel or Via to
Nvidia.
I am not saying that it won't work, just saying that it may not work
terribly well.

Cheers

Clive

 

[Gert B. Frob]

I'm talking about experience...
In Red's case he is proposing to go from a 800 MHz Intel platform to a 3000+
64 bit AMD - a much bigger speed step than yours, plus a technology change
from Intel to AMD, plus a chipset change from probably Intel or Via to
Nvidia.
I am not saying that it won't work, just saying that it may not work
terribly well.

Cheers

Clive

What I mean is just what are the manifestations of these "timing" issues?

 

[Clive Lumb]

What I mean is just what are the manifestations of these "timing"
issues?

Ah OK. Some examples (I run a park of about 40 computers):
Moved Win2K from Intel (P2 450 or maybe P3 800) to Athlon 1700, all OK,
Moved to Athlon 2000 and the mouse started freezing (generally 1 second
after it starts moving), play any type of video/audio file and the sounds
stutters 5 seconds in. Move back to the 1700, all OK. The 2000 runs fine on
the same board with a fresh install.

Upgraded an Asus A7V333 with Duron 800 to an A7N8X with Barton 2800+. Finite
element software actually ran slower than on the original (suspect a memory
or disk issue since ANSYS uses all the RAM and then some). Repaired Win2K,
all was fine.

Moving from a P2 450 on an Abit BX board to an Athlon 1200 on some cheapo
m/b and the computer would bluescreen regularly. Reinstalled Win2k and te
problem went away.

That being said, the computer I am using to write this has had 3 boards and
4 processors over the last 2 1/2 years, beta bioses, beta Nforce drivers
etc. and it's still fast and stable. However all the m/b's were Asus and all
the processors AMD.

Cheers

Clive

 

[CraigNJ]

PS -- FYI, Microsoft has a whitepaper on the pros & cons of upgrading
a PC's Windows via upgrade vs. wipe-and-load, at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/deploy/upwpload.mspx
They seem to favor having IT departments use wipe-and-load.

Craig in NJ