Changing mobo

Turbo10

Turbo10

Active Member
Ok well i love upgrading my pc etc and i was thinking about buying a new motherboard one with sli and stuff i think its an Asrock conroe something but my current mobo is a 775 and the one i want to get is a 775. Even though they are the same socket will i have to reinstall windows vista again or just have to re-activate it

thanks for your help
 
You will likely have to reinstall Windows unless the board uses the same drivers as your old mobo. You can use Acronis True Image with the Universal Restore plugin to avoid having to redo your OS. It will replace your mobo drivers on the fly when you copy the image back over.
 
Yeah, expect to have to do a full reinstall. You can probably get away with installing directly over your old Windows install, just back up your important data, especially anything saved in the My Documents folders. It's not particularly hard, though, only takes maybe 30 mins on mine w/ XP.

Do you have a prebuilt rig (ie-one bought from Dell/HP/Gateway/etc)? If so, the Windows disk they gave you is gimped, with some of the critical files stored permanently on the mobo that came with the rig, and not present on your disk. If that's the case, you're going to need a new copy.

If you've got a full copy of Windows ready to go, do yourself a favor and download nLite, then pop over to the RyanVM site. Use nLite to make a shiny new Windows install disk that has all the Windows updates (that you downloaded from RyanVM) folded into it. You're also going to need the Ryan Integrator for this.
 
It's likely you will have to do a full install like the others have said.

However if you want to try to use the old OS on a new mobo then you can try uninstalling anything driver related before changing to the new mobo. (Such as chipset, sound card, vga). and remember to back up important data!

I've done this before changing from a old P4 mobo to a BIOSTAR GF8100 M2+ SE AM2+ mobo a couple months ago and the system is still up and running. The catch is i'm running windows xp 32 on the system so i'm not sure how vista would deal with it.
 
Vista has this thing with it so you can change hardware without having to reinstall it e.g.CPU but i suppose the motherboard is a big thing with the chipset etc so ill just get trueimage and back everything up
thanks people
 
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