What will happen if I do this?

[jeffncris]

I am thinking of buying an "upgrade kit", basically a much better mobo and processor, lots more ram, better sound and video card. It has No hard drive or DVD drives installed, those will come directly from my computer. I have XP installed. my question is, will it:

1. Work great, since XP will detect the new hardware and everything is plug and play now

or

2. Freeze up and refuse to boot since it doesn't recognise all the major changes

or

3. Something in between?

I'm no novice but I haven't tried this before! Any help will be most appreciated!

jeffncris

 

[SNGX1275]

Most likely #3.

Recently there seems to be a surge in people posting on here that are attempting to use their previous hard disk/windows install on a new motherboard with new hardware. This is generally a bad idea.

If you are really set on doing this that way, I would suggest going into your device manager on the old system just before you retire it, and uninstalling about everything you can, probably everything. Then shut down and put your new system together and try and boot. If you get lucky you'll get into Windows. I suspect you'll BSOD along the way though. When this happens you can boot up off your XP disk and try to repair Windows.

I would strongly recommend backing up using XP File and Settings transfer Wizard and saving to a file as opposed to trying to send over network (to a computer that isn't built yet). That wizard will backup pretty much everything, then you can burn that to a dvd or possibly cds, or better yet put on an external hard drive. Then once you get your NEW Windows installation back you can restore your files from that.

A more risky way to do this if your file is too big for a single dvd would be to defrag then download a gparted disk and see if you can create a new partition with free space, then from within windows format that partition and place the File and Settings Transfer Wizard's file on that. That way you can wipe your existing Windows partition, install there. Then restore those files from the new partition you made with gparted.

 

[jeffncris]

Thanks for the info, as I suspected it will be a major pain in the a** so I will hold off for now and just probably buy a new system w/Vista on it.

Thanks again.