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Changing GPU - Windows 7 Clean Install?
- Thread starter Garretta
- Start date
CrimsonKnight13
Lord Stabington of [H]ard|Fortress
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- Jan 8, 2008
- Messages
- 8,440
No & No.
Just completely uninstall the Nvidia drivers before you take the GPU out of your PC. No point in reinstalling Windows.
Just completely uninstall the Nvidia drivers before you take the GPU out of your PC. No point in reinstalling Windows.
KickAssCop
[H]F Junkie
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- Mar 19, 2003
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- 8,330
No.
tmillszero1
Limp Gawd
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- May 11, 2011
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Absolutley no benefit at all. Only reason why you should reinstall OS after HW installs are repair installs due to HAL issues with Win7. Even then if the HW is similar, you really shouldn't have that many issues other than having to re-activate Windows.
D
Deleted member 184142
Guest
Reformatting every 6 months is a bit extreme with win7 etc. There is not much point in that, and so long as the video drivers etc are uninstalled first you should have no problem, I never have and I use to swap AMD to NVIDIA all the time. Hell back when I was in Vista I was able to do a motherboard swap without a reinstall.
There seems to be a reformat fetish with some people that when you change something out you need to reformat and reinstall, use to know a guy who would do that even if he upgraded/changed RAM.
There seems to be a reformat fetish with some people that when you change something out you need to reformat and reinstall, use to know a guy who would do that even if he upgraded/changed RAM.
i had a bad experience going from nvidia to amd on my cousins computer. i used driver sweeper and did a proper uninstall and install. Every game he launched would crash with a blue screen and only a fresh windows install fixed it
worth a shot but if you notice games are crashing do a re-install of windows
worth a shot but if you notice games are crashing do a re-install of windows
This happened to me as well.
Of course I had done quite a few GPU swaps by the time it started giving me trouble... but I did have to wipe and start over clean.
Usually it is not a problem, but it can and does happen every once in a while.
Ryoohki360
Gawd
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- Aug 23, 2010
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- 605
I haven't formatted in 2 and half years (WIn 7) and i've change from ATI to NVIDIA, didn't even use driver clean up, just uninstalled the Catalyst Control center before removing my 5850...
Don't use Driver sweeper, there isn't any need.. There is potential to break more than it fixes.. You probably just experienced that..
Driver sweeper is a wholesale deletion tool.. Its not something i would trust my system too in the slightest. I would rather delete by hand knowing exactly what its doing.
Wise words.
I dunno, it's good for registry deletion. For anything that you can just go into Control Panel and uninstall, there's no point.
I used it last night to remove my Realtek stuff after installing a sound card. Worked just fine.
This happened when I switched from a 5970 to 2 6970's. My PC was raining BSOD's in alot of 3D applications. Reformat solved everything. I think some kind of conflicting residual driver stays even with the use of Driver Sweeper.
More likely something just screwed up by using DS. AMD and nVidia use unified drivers, why would you need to uninstall/sweep/reinstall when using the same vendor? even between different vendors, there should only be a need to uninstall existing drivers and install new.
Installers from both vendors are much better now than say 10 years ago. Also, Windows won't try to use files/drivers/registry settings from non-existant hardware.
People that claim DS solves all their problems more than likely had a fubar'd system in the first place from mountains of crap being installed.
If people want to use DS, that's their perogative of course, but it's tiring of reading the same crap perpetuating this myth that you must sweep between installs.
I've had my current installation of Windows 7 running since Sept 2009, and in the meantime I've gone from E8500 to my current 2500k with three different GPU's in between, both NVIDIA and AMD, without reinstalling. The system's still running like I installed it yesterday, so no need to reinstall.