Equipment Upgrade XP Professional

[Glenn Coller]

I have a need to upgrade two systems currently running
Windows XP professional. The upgrade will consist of
replacement of the motherboards required to upgrade to
the Intel 3.2 P4 processors and added memory. The
remaining hardware including the HDD's will be moved into
the new boxes which are required because of MB
configuration.

Question: Will this, assuming that the hardware is
installed correctly, run? I suspect that I am going to
have problems with the registration which may contain
info regarding the old equipment. If these we NT based
boxes they wouldn't care and I would not be concerned
about down time. XP Professional is different and while
it is a good operating system, the Microsoft license
management protocal may be a problem. If I have to
reload these machines because they have been upgraded
then they will become NT boxes which they were converted
from to start with.

Please advise.

 

[Yves Leclerc]

You will need to do a XP repair re-install on top of the XP. Motherboards
and the main base for the Product activation and if changed, the activation
needs to be reset and re-activated.

Y.

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Greetings --

Normally, assuming a retail license, unless the new motherboard is
virtually identical to the old one (same chipset, same IDE
controllers, same BIOS version, etc.), you'll need to perform a repair
(a.k.a. in-place upgrade) installation, at the very least:

How to Perform an In-Place Upgrade of Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=KB;EN-US;Q315341

As always when undertaking such a significant change, back up any
important data before starting.

This will probably also require re-activation. If it's been more
than 120 days since you last activated that specific Product Key,
you'll most likely be able to activate via the internet without
problem. If it's been less, you might have to make a 5 minute phone
call.


Bruce Chambers

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[Alex Nichol]

I have a need to upgrade two systems currently running
Windows XP professional. The upgrade will consist of
replacement of the motherboards required to upgrade to
the Intel 3.2 P4 processors and added memory. The
remaining hardware including the HDD's will be moved into
the new boxes which are required because of MB
configuration.

Question: Will this, assuming that the hardware is
installed correctly, run?

You need to do a repair reinstallation straight off, to ensure that the
interfaces to the hardware are now right. Set the BIOS to boot CD
before Hard disk, then boot the XP CD, start Setup (do not take
'Repair' at this stage), then after the license agreement take 'Repair
Installation'. This will retain your existing software installations
and most settings. But Updates will have to be run again, especially
SP1;
It is important to activate the basic XP Firewall before you ever
connect to the net to get the patches, so as to be protected against
things like the BLAST worm.

This should retain your activation status, though if you have never
registered you may have the setup suggest it now (don't bother). But
you may find you have made so many changes that you need to activate
again by phoning in, that is still easier than doing a complete reformat
and then activating on the net (and that would, anyway, only go through
if 120 days have passed since last time. That would be less likely if
you had NICs on plug-in cards that you could take across and use with
inbuilt interfaces disabled in BIOS
,