Upgrade a motherboard without reinstalling Vista... bad idea?

Z

Zinn

Guest
just wondering. if i were to jump to an X38 board in the near future, would i have to reinstall vista? i know this didn't work in XP (well usually), but i was wondering if it would work in vista.

if you don't know for sure and just want to say something negative about vista or what an idiot i am, please stfu in advance. thanks.
 
There have been several posts reporting successful board transplants without reinstalling Vista here over the last few months.... I have not done this personally, but from what I have read, I think you should be fine.

Probably want to back up ahead of time... but, um... I'm sure you already thought of that:p
 
thanks.

oh yeah, i have multiple backups on stacks of DVDs... even so far as to keep some of the backups with relatives in case my apartment complex is demolished by a freak tsunami or something
 
One thing you can do is before you do the physical transplant is to go and uninstall all of the system devices and any other motherboard specific device in the Device manager.
 
I have personally switch my Vista HD over to a new rig all together. You will be required to call Microsoft to tell them that you've upgraded the motherboard and you'll receive a new serial. This takes roughly 5 min; it's rather pain free. And I agree you should uninstall some drivers before hand, and as always you can never go wrong with a backup.
 
Master Blaster said:
I have personally switch my Vista HD over to a new rig all together. You will be required to call Microsoft to tell them that you've upgraded the motherboard and you'll receive a new serial. This takes roughly 5 min; it's rather pain free. And I agree you should uninstall some drivers before hand, and as always you can never go wrong with a backup.
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That's great. I don't feel so wary about this now. It took me cumulative days to tweak and dial everything in perfectly and I don't feel like reinstalling and starting over from scratch!

I have this magic business license that lets me activate on up to 30 different PCs before MS start pissing and moaning, so I'm not too worried about that part.
 
For what it's worth, I have done this a couple times with my XP machine and my Vista box. Once or twice I've gotten it to work just directly switching parts and powering back up, but most time that didn't work for. I've found that Acronis True Image has a really nice Universal restore feature. If you download the trial version of Acronis True Image Server edition I think, it will let you do that. It will restore your image to any hardware platform, bypassing the HAL, then let you install any necessary drivers once it's up and running again.
 
It sounds like you're keeping the same processor, so I think you should be fine. If you were swapping to a different CPU architecture then you might have issues.
 
Considering it seems that you are going from an Intel chipset to an Intel chipset, you shouldn't have any problems.
 
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