Upgrade reformat?

[The Null]

Hello

i went down to Harvey Norman (electronics store in Australia) and i asked about whether i should upgrade my RAM or my CPU, in the end i was told that if i upgrade my CPU i would have to reformat on my hard drive. is this true?

 

[crashthenet44]

If thats all your doing, just the CPU and mem then you shouldn't need to reformat. Now if you were swapping motherboards then thats a different story.

 

[The Null]

uuhh, what will happen if i change motherboards?

 

[engiNURD]

(Assuming XP...)

Here, read this... its regarding windows product activation: http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.php

Basically, if you change too many things at once, XP will deactivate itself, depending on the version you have.

Aside from WPA, you'd have to hope it boots and clean out the old drivers, or do a repair installation.

I just noticed you have Vista in your sig... I wonder if its the same type of thing for WPA or not... Hopefully someone else can give some insight, cuz I'm too lazy to go through the google hits, lol.

 

[The Null]

Does Vista have the Windows Product Activation stuff on it? if i upgrade i don't want to have to format all because i have no way of backing it up.

 

[133]

of course vista has product activation

 

[digital_exhaust]

As long as it's a retail version of Vista, you should be fine... you may have to call in to reactivate, but you should not have to reinstall... I have seen several reports here from people who have made substantial hardware changes and all has been fine....as I said, you may have to reactivate, but that's not really a big deal......

 

[The Null]

i just don't want to have to call up Microsoft, i did an update from MCE2005 and i'll just leave a hint, my copy of vista kinda fell off the back of a truck if u know what i mean ...i dont want to have lots of hassles and end up formatting and installing MCE again