Hardware upgrade

[Phil]

I'm running Windows XP Pro on an old Pentium 2 machine. In
the near future I'm going to get a Pentium 4 mother board,
processor, memory, and power supply, but I plan to reuse
the hard drive and everything else. Do I need to format my
hard drive and reinstall Windows for such a big hardware
change, or will Windows detect the new hardware and adjust
itself without causing any complications?

 

[purplehaz]

A repair install, at the least, should get you up and running, but if it was
me I'd format and clean install.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I'm running Windows XP Pro on an old Pentium 2 machine. In
the near future I'm going to get a Pentium 4 mother board,
processor, memory, and power supply, but I plan to reuse
the hard drive and everything else. Do I need to format my
hard drive and reinstall Windows for such a big hardware
change, or will Windows detect the new hardware and adjust
itself without causing any complications?

In between. Once you have changed the motherboard, start by entering
BIOS setup to set up date and time and make sure the hard drive is
correctly detected. While there set the Boot order to CD before hard
drive, put the XP CD in the drive, and exit to 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 match the system to the
new hardware. But Updates will have to be run again, especially SP1;

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 nevertheless find you have made so many changes that you need to
activate again by phoning in,