Maximum PC

I changing my motherboard out this week and I want to know what I need to do so I don’t' run into any driver conflicts. Do I need to delete all the drivers off my hard drive when changing motherboards?

Which OS are you running?

If it is 2000,XP or 9x, you might be able to get away with simply booting up as plug and pray will kick in to install the new drivers.

However, it has been my expierence that when installing a new board it is often better to backup old data and reinstall fresh. This will ensure that everything is up and running as it should be and it is a great time to do some house keeping.

better provide more information. we don't even know what motherboard you have.

just backup your data and re-install windows, because your boot times will decrease a bit if you've been running you comp for a while.

there are ways of swapping out the motherboard without re-installing, and they involve either loading generic drivers of deleting huge parts of the registry, those methods can be easily found on Google.

Backup your data and do a fresh install. Youll run into problems or a slow system if you put a new board in and just reload new drivers. I upgraded an ASUS board to a new ASUS model and tried just swapping boards, everything the same, and i had instability issues. Fresh install is the way to go.

This would probalby explain why Windows has been such a PITA the past few weeks.

I swapped out my mobo, but never knew that I would have to reinstall the OS.

The thing is taking longer than Linux to boot, and it's just overall slow.

Do I have to delete the windows tree, or can I just get by with a reinstall over the existing Windows?

I guess it wouldn't be that difficult to deltree the windows directory, I would probalbly gain quite a lot of performance out of it.

So, deltree windows, or reinstall over existing?

Dan O.

Backup any important data, reformat, and reinstall. There are ways to avoid a reformat/reinstall and not suffer the instabilities or performance hit, but I'm not an advocate of them when doing a mobo swap.

It's best to format the drive.

I've found this is only advisable if you're staying within a chipset family. eg 845G -> 845PE, etc.

I have a p41875 Soyo dragon 2 motherboard which by the way sucks. I bought an Asusp4p800s so I guess the fresh install is the way to go? I'm currently running XP for the OS.

really should take out 2000 from there. that OS is very picky about an IDE controller change.

By all means. YES you want to reload your OS clean.




That's why I advise staying within a chipset family when you're gonna try a mobo swap without reloading the OS. (Among other things.)

The problem with doing a fresh install is the Office activation. Ugh.

Notice how I said "might"... I agree with you staying in the chipset famliy usually is much more successful.

Although it is picky, I have never really had issues with going to a new IDE controller provided that the system is patched. I did get a failure once and simply ran the recovery to resolve the problem.

That said, that is why I said a fresh install is the preferred method.

When I swapped out mobo along with Proc. and Video card XP wouldn't start up and I had to reinstall. I think it thgouth i was tryign to install on a different computer. =(

~War