Swapping motherboard without reinstalling OS?

Liamalxd · 25 Sep 2010 at 22:52

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.

thingemajib · 25 Sep 2010 at 23:07

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.

Liamalxd · 25 Sep 2010 at 23:11

thingemajib said:
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?

thingemajib · 26 Sep 2010 at 00:04

I haven't heard of any single activation games...

list a few of them so we can see what we're working with.

Chances are you can sort it by ringing customer support and explaining the situation.

pastymuncher · 26 Sep 2010 at 14:41

I believe that these games need to be uninstalled so that you get your activation back. It connects to their servers on uninstalling and you effectively get the credit back. Bloody ridiculous if you ask me to make people who have paid for the game to jump through hoops to get it to work but there you go.

Memphis · 26 Sep 2010 at 15:26

Liamalxd said:
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?

Uninstall the games correctly before rebuilding.