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IamGimli

join:2004-02-28
Canada
Reviews:
·Primus Talkbroad..
·B2B2C High-Speed..

reply to CylonRed

Re: Replacing motherboard - need to reinstall OS and Drivers?

said by CylonRed:

It will very possibly need to be registered but that is it - there is nothing in XP that will prevent booting of the PC when hardware is changed.
That's not quite true. For some hardware changes the activation process will lead to a blue screen on bootup and there's no way around it but to restore the hardware to the original and properly prepare the system before changing the hardware. That happened to me a couple of years ago when I wanted to replace my boot drive with a larger one and I've heard of similar occurrences with other pieces of hardware too.

The "proper" way to make such a low-level change in the hardware of your PC is to use the Microsoft tool called "sysprep". Sysprep can strip the whole driver layer from your install and make it boot into "install" mode the next time the system is booted so the drivers and system info (including activation) can be properly re-initialized without losing any programs or data. That's the tool system builders use to prepare their images before large scale distribution but it's also used for single-system migrations.

Jaghar

join:2001-01-30
Painesville, OH

Man....that sounds like a great tool. Does that come standard with WinXP?

I got stuck registering one time because the on-board modem didn't work because I had removed the drivers. I had to call in...that sucked because the service rep had a hard time getting my numbers to work.
--
We will always be much more human than we wish to be.


IamGimli

join:2004-02-28
Canada
Reviews:
·Primus Talkbroad..
·B2B2C High-Speed..

said by Jaghar:

Man....that sounds like a great tool. Does that come standard with WinXP?
Yep. IIRC It's on the install CD, in the "SUPPORT" directory or something similar.

I would recommend downloading it from MS though, they have a number of revisions which work even better than the original.

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