If I plug my exisiting hard drive/cpu and other stuff into the new motherboard will it recognize everything and boot straight to vista with all my files in tact or do I need to back everything up?
If I plug my exisiting hard drive/cpu and other stuff into the new motherboard will it recognize everything and boot straight to vista with all my files in tact or do I need to back everything up?
With XP you would probably need to reactivate Windows since a motherboard change counts as one of the events that should trigger reactivation but Vista might be a little bit different. You don't specifically need to reinstall in that a phone call for the reactivation code would sort it but I would recommend the reinstall as being neater and less likely to lead to problems.
Ideally an OS install should be run on the hardware used on initial install, when replacing a major component such as a motherboard it is recomended to do a fresh install as there can be major issues with drivers, These are mainly down to chipset drivers and storage controller drivers. It will probably work due to the driver set in windows initially but i really would recommend biting the bullet and doing a fresh install depite the agro.
You can uninstall the drivers but thats not gonna clean up the mess of chipset drivers and all other devices relating to the old motherboard, so your gonna end up with a bloated os thats chock ablock with stuff realting to your old hardware. Just do a fresh install will run much smoother.
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