swapping board need a windows reinstall ?

Soldato
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your wrong you dont NEED to but it does make sence. I have a AMD 620 x4 with a nivida card and i swapt it for a x58 UD5 intel.....been running fine 2 months. I have since reformated and has made no noticable diff.
 
Soldato
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With changing boards the main thing is around the chipset drivers. Whilst there is absolutely nothing stopping you from uninstalling the old ones, shutting down, swapping boards, booting up and installing your new drivers, many years of enthusiasts' experiences have led to the philosophy that it's better to take the opportunity to start afresh, since you often end up with odd little niggles.

Plus, if you view reinstalling Windows as a chore, you obviously need the practice ;).
 
Soldato
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so theres a chance windows will boot?

I have never had one not boot put it that way, you cant get much further apart from going AMD AM3 to a Intel X58 that was on windows vista. Dont misunderstand im all for a reformat every time i change my main rig, this is a spare folding rig and i was lazy ;)
The question was do i need to and the the anwser is no you dont need to but is highly recommended to avoid any problems :)
 
Associate
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Would going from an intel to an amd board and obviously a new cpu, require a reinstall of windows?
please say, no it should be fine...;)

Not really but you would have to make sure you uninstall all the drivers and reference to that motherboard, it is possible, because i was able to do it in the pass, but if you have time to experiment then go for it, but to be honest it would be better to start again, because with a new install if you have any problem you will know for sure it wasnt because of the old board.

Also if you dont have the original disc for your operating system that is the other reason to do what i stated above, only thing i am not to sure about if you well be asked to activate again because of the major change ie motherboard.
 
Associate
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Plus, if you view reinstalling Windows as a chore, you obviously need the practice ;).

well from my experience with windows the old versions was a chore, with windows 7 everything is so much easier since a lot of drivers are all standard shouldnt take you more than maybe 90 mins max (Which is windows and board/graphic drivers...) to get your system up and running.
 
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Also if you dont have the original disc for your operating system that is the other reason to do what i stated above, only thing i am not to sure about if you well be asked to activate again because of the major change ie motherboard.

i do have the disc (windows7 64 btw) so would i have to ring microsoft to activate it again?
 
Soldato
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I built a new computer recenty, and cloned my old PCs hard drive as an experiment to see if Windows 7 would detect the new hardware properly and to see if the performance was affected.

To my amazement it all worked really well. Windows detected and installed nearly all the drivers, the rest I updated manually from the motheboard CD or from the hardware manufacturers website.

It's been running a few weeks now with no stability problems, and excellent performance.
 
Soldato
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When i went from s775 to s1366 i did'nt bother doing a fresh install as the install was very new anyways, all i did was install all the new stuff, booted up, and let windows sort itself out, rebooted must have been 5-10 times for drivers and what not.

For activation all i had to do was call the automated number and enter the code i was given, and iv been fine since then.

But whatever way you do it, back up your data just incase.
 
Soldato
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As long as it's running Microsoft IDE/AHCI drivers then there's a very good chance it will boot on completely different hardware. The majority of blue screens when changing motherboards is the fact that the different storage drivers can't access the hard drive.
 
Associate
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If you are using a different chip set then yes. I went from a
Asus Striker Extreme 680i LGA 775 > Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L Intel G31 LGA 775= required reinstall
Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L Intel G31 LGA 775 > Asus P7P55D-E P55 = required reinstall

This was both on an SSD, the drive would boot to the windows loading screen and then BSOD everytime. SO just reinstalled
 
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