hi i just ordered one of these (scroll to the description) and i have a question.
i have an emachines t1220 and im planning on putting its hard drive in this new machine. im buying the cpu and memory but im using everything else from the emachines- graphics card, hard drive, dvd rom. so my question is, if i put my old hard drive in this new pc, will it just be like turning on my emachines with different hardware (windows booting up normally with all the junk on the hard drive still being there) or will i have to wipe out the hard drive and put it in and then install windows and everything, fresh start? i dunno how to explain it really but if you understand my question i would eppreciate the help.

thanks!

if you change the motherboard, windows will not boot and you have to reformat/reinstall windows.

ok thanks thats what i figured

I've changed the motherboard on my dell and didn't reinstall windows xp, although it was somewhat of a pain, it works. You have to do a bunch of stuff before you switch to get it to work.

like what? install new motherboard drivers? can you tell me how you did it?

Ok, I read some guide online about how to replace a motherboard with xp installed, and not reinstall. What I did was went to the add/remove programs, removed programs that were motherboard specific, like I had intel extreme graphics drivers that I uninstalled, modem driver, etc.

Then, I went to device manager, uninstalled a lot of things, like my ide controller, video card, modem, network adapter, and sound.

Then I switched boards.
I went from a dell intel 845gl mobo to a gigabyte 8IG1000MK 865g motherboard.
I did this to get an agp slot and to be able to use ddr memory.

Once the new board was in, I booted up, to bios first, to check settings. It detected my cpu wrong, and was running my 1.8ghz p4 at 2.7ghz! but would crash due to the high oc, so I got the cpu speed corrected, made a few other changes like cas latency, boot order, etc, and tried to boot to windows. I think IIRC, windows said something about a hardware change, and it started reconfiguring itself, which took a while, but then it booted to windows in really low resolution graphic mode, 640x480 low refresh rate. I then installed the motherboard driver, graphics driver, and other drivers. After a few days of configuring, I had it back to normal. I'd find that I forgot some driver, or some device wasn't working, so I had to fix that when I found it. But it's been running well since. I don't know if it will work for you, but it did for me. I was really surprised. Everyone told me it was a waste of time, and that it couldn't work, but me, being cheap, decided I would try to save $90 and reuse the xp that came with the dell, and it worked.

Hopefully it can work for you too. Some oem xp(that come from mfgs) are missing a repair xp option(mine was missing). If I had had that it may have been easier. It's not the recovery console option, it's the same as setting up a clean install until you see the "repair" option.

i think im gonna try that, thanks.