Advice needed on new mobo fitting

davegriffiths · 11 Jun 2007 at 11:46

hey guys... am asking this on behalf of my mate..

during the nasty storms a few days ago in scotland, his PC went caput...

it wont turn on.... now... he gets a green light on the mobo when he switches the power on, but nowt else....

hes been told, the power supply and mobo would need replacing.. due to being a dell tho, dell want £115 for the mobo and £75 for a 305w PSU.

so he wants to re-utilise his ram, HD, GPU, CPU etc.. and fit it all into a new STD case with a STD ATX mobo and PSU.

now.. will there be a problem fitting a new mobo in with his old HD due to all the installed drivers being for the old mobo..

would there be any other problems like XP not working etc?

edit: ohh.. forgot..... hes got DDR2 ram but its 400mhz.. will this work with the more modern mobo's?

Nicos Rex · 11 Jun 2007 at 11:55

This raises a couple of issues.

The main one is that although it is possible to kludge things so that the existing XP install will work after a fashion with the new hardware, it is never a really desirable situation. There are always likely to be stability issues due to the near impossibility of removing all the registy entries that relate to the old hardware. This will lead to having a system that is likely to suffer from impaired performance at best and apparently random lockups and blue screens at worst.

Best practice is for a clean install of XP.

This may prove to be a problem as he will probably not have a full install disk for XP, and of course the Dell recovery disk will have all the wrong drivers on it.

There is also the possibility that XP will have to be activated again following the hardware change which may not be allowed by Microsoft due to the variation from the original product license.

davegriffiths · 11 Jun 2007 at 12:06

ok... he was planning to do a fresh install, but he wanted to get on the HD to get pics and music off before formatting it...

will this be possible, or is a new HD needed?

Markatomic · 11 Jun 2007 at 12:11

Best thing he can do is hook the hard drive up with someone elses pc and pull the pics/data he wants to keep onto their hard drive. Or alternatively buy a new hdd and pull it across once its running. Given the price of hdds these days, its what i'd do.
Mark

davegriffiths · 11 Jun 2007 at 12:54

is it possible tho, to run the pc with the old HD just to get this stuff off or will it just not run?

he wants to do a fresh install, but without having to purchase a new HD due to funds...

Markatomic · 11 Jun 2007 at 14:19

I stand by what Nicos rex says above...the only thing you can do is try and hope that it works. More than likely it wont boot into windows, instead it'll loop over and over. I have never had a change in motherboard continue to work alongside the previous windows.
So give it a try and maybe you'll be lucky.

Mark