How bad will Win 7 explode if I tried this.

ziscwg

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 20, 2004
Messages
354
I normally reinstall Win 7 from scratch when I swap to a new mb.

If I take this Core2Duo p965 chipset setup I have now and swap the memory, CPU and MB, can I even boot?

I can install new drivers and all that. I just want this one program to do what I need for a bit.

I have one program that is a pain to reinstall. The current set up seems to be having mb issues. I can see what looks to be like a blow cap on the MB. It's had a good life and I don't want to fret about it.

I don't have as much time as I want to do a clean install. I'll just limp this system along for a while.
 
Won't blow up if you use Sysprep.

You may want to clone your existing HDD if you want to keep a working backup (Clonezilla is a good tool for this).
 
Won't blow up if you use Sysprep.

You may want to clone your existing HDD if you want to keep a working backup (Clonezilla is a good tool for this).

Great, that should do it.

What could go wrong, it's Windows. It's as stable as a wet noodle on hurricane.
 
Most (all?) versions of Windows 7 also have the ability to create a "System Image Backup" which is essentially a "ghost" image of the system that you can restore in worst case scenario using a windows 7 boot CD or a recovery CD it'll prompt you to create.

Your computer will likely need rebooted several times and may bsod (especially if your SATA controller is switched between AHCI and ATA, or RAID mode). But you'll likely be able to get it working in a minimal way.
 
It won't explode, even without sysprep. I've gone from an nVidia AMD chipset (980a) to an AMD chipset (790X and 890FX) to an Intel chipset (X58) without ever using sysprep, and I never had any problems.
 
Even though you can just swap the drive, I would recommend using sysprep as it deletes the whole hardware Key from the registry.

On a side note, if you do the win backup and restore and you install the image on a new larger hdd, the volume will have to be extended so you can use all of it.

Since OP is swapping out MB, Windows will have to be reactivated and that requires you to call MS to get a new installation ID.
 
I've swapped a board without reinstalling Win7 in the past. Aside from reactivating Windows and manually reinstalling one or two non-essential drivers that Device Manager didn't pick up, it was all a piece of cake. I would still recommend making a backup, however.
 
Even though you can just swap the drive, I would recommend using sysprep as it deletes the whole hardware Key from the registry.

On a side note, if you do the win backup and restore and you install the image on a new larger hdd, the volume will have to be extended so you can use all of it.

Since OP is swapping out MB, Windows will have to be reactivated and that requires you to call MS to get a new installation ID.

Oh yes, call MS. Well, at least I have never had any issues doing this with my 4 retail copies I have. Oddly enough, I usually seem to have one that's always not in use. I have this one laptop I have not turned on in 9 months since I got my Galaxy tablet
 
One of the things to be wary of when transferring a complete environment like this are drivers with control software components. Sysprep removes all of the driver INFs and can remove some Sysprep aware software, but not all driver control software is Sysprep aware. You may be left with entries under Programs and Features that correspond with older drivers. I would highly recommend removing these items.

Brandon
Windows Outreach Team- IT Pro
Windows for IT Pros on TechNet
 
I used Sysprep with XP but haven't used it with Win 7 and have done quite a bit of hardware swapping over the past 6 years.
All 3 of my main machines had Windows installed in August of 2009, and all have gone through at least 3 CPU/Mobo/Ram/GPU swaps.

one thing to note is if AHCI wasn't enabled on your old setup and it's enabled on the the new setup, you will blue screen when trying to boot.

My install dates on workstations,
win-install-dates.jpg
 
A long held argument is that Windows doesn't play nice with hardware changes. I've done numerous hardware swaps in Windows 7 and 8, including a couple that were basically a brand new build with the old HDD/SSD and Windows reconfigured itself without issue. Could Windows be better, sure....but is it the stinking pile that requires almost daily restarts and clean installs after every little change that it used to be, not by a long shot.
 
I couldn't agree more with USMCGrunt! Hell, I'm even one of those people who liked Windows ME! :eek: I didn't have all the issues and crashes everyone else did, and maybe it's because what I had was an extremely stripped down version of WinME, but who knows...

As for Win7 I've done the same as a couple of the above, by switching to different hardware of different brand, architectures, and Windows 7 AND XP have always taken it in stride. Some of those times I don't think I needed a restart either, but when I do it seems to generally be for the storage controllers, typically the secondary ones that are feature-adds by the motherboard maker (standalone controllers external from the chipset), which I don't generally use anyways lol I'm curious how much of a performance difference there is between a swapped and fresh install, or even a "Sysprep" swap and a non prepped, and if I could be bothered enough, I'd do that but I have better things to do :(

As for those "needs restarting all the time" claims, like USMC mentioned it's simply not needed. I can testify to that first hand... This laptop, it's nothing special it's a Toshiba older L305 Satellite with Win7 32bit (not utilizing the full 4GB I have installed heh) and a filled to the brim 160GB HDD, with an upgraded CPU (had a Pentium Dual Core 'Core' architecture T7400 that ran at 400MHz bus, I stuffed in a C2D T9550 Penryn, pin modded to run @ 800MHz bus which doesn't run at full speed since I think it was a 1066 bus chip :p). I run this thing 24/7 w/o break! Current uptime, 41day 23hr 50min :cool: My desktop is similar, in that I don't restart it ever I just sleep it every night (not Hibernate), and its uptime is like 19day which if you count in the 8hr sleep nights means I've not slept it in like a month as well.

Is all of this recommended? Naw... Are my machines in a mission-critical environment where I need to worry about the best security, reliability, etc... Nope. More importantly though, I don't crash anyways heh Sure, this laptop will crash a browser every now and then (more than most people's I'll admit, but I could avoid that if I simply shut down the browser every now and then lol They, too, run 24/7 for no reason other than I only have the choice of cellular "broadband" which means a data cap, so there are instance that I just don't want to have to redownload a tab which I'll be coming back to anyways.

ANYWAYS, the TL;DR? No, you don't have to start fresh or do much prep even. I WILL SAY THIS, if you run your system's storage configured to AHCI and you switch chipsets brands (going from AMD to Intel, vice versa), that could and probably will be recipe for disaster. Even if you haven't switched brands, make sure you have the BIOS set the same with AHCI on or off.
 
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