Swapping motherboard without reinstalling OS?

[Liamalxd]

Its been a good few years since i ever swapped a motherboard out and upgraded it but last time i did i remember the OS wouldent boot up without reinstallation.

Back then tho we were dealing with windows xp and ide hard drives.

now im using windows 7 and a 500gb sata hdd and a asus m2n4-sli motherboard and a dual core amd cpu. but im wanting to swap it out for a quad core asus motherboard (amd still)

Am i able with the new hardware/software to literally just swap out the old board for the new one and the OS will boot and just pick the board up as a new device or is some driver swapping required? for sata drivers etc.

Thanks.

 

[Liamalxd]

whilst it is possible (or was when i did it by accident once), windows will still have all the old drivers kicking around which a) might slow down bootups/shutdowns and b) could possibly conflict causing all kinds of headaches.

Long story short, best to just be done with it and reinstall.

Then this leads to my next question, i have a lot of games on my system that are single activation products and registered to that machine. once i reinstall the OS it will count as a seperate machine. is there a way to move them or do i have to rebuy everything?