Welp, in the pursuit of PS2 frames without becoming an Intel acolyte I went ahead and ordered a new mobo, AMD FX8350 and a Corsair 600w PSU. So, this will be my first time installing a new motherboard! I am kind of concerned about doing it right, I have windows 7 64-bit and was wondering if you guys know the steps to take to ensure that drivers switch smoothly without reinstalling OS or reformatting. Does windows 7 automatically reconfigure things or will I need to prepare my OS installation before switching? This is the new mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131877 This is the old mobo: http://www.msi.com/product/mb/GF615M-P33.html
You are way better off doing a complete reinstall. This will clean things up and get rid of all your junk data that is sitting around and will ensure no old drivers are left around causing problems. If you really want to keep your OS then you should uninstall all your drivers before you do the switch, then change out all the hardware, and then install all the new drivers. But you are still going to have Windows freak out and ask you to buy a new copy. Windows license is tied to hardware and when you change out your motherboard it will de-activate itself. Many times you can input your same serial key again and it will accept it. If that doesnt work then you can call Microsoft and say it isnt letting your activate and then answer all their questions. Or you can just do a reinstall with your same key and it shouldnt give you any issues.
I am prepared to call Microsoft to deal with that, but is there any risk to my hard drive's data if something doesn't work out by trying to just uninstall all the drivers first? I am up to trying it, but it wouldn't be worth it if I lost everything. What is the method I would use? Safe mode and uninstall all drivers on device manager and then switch the hardware? Thanks for the reply.
There is no risk to your data. The risk is that Windows won't boot or work right with the motherboard change and all of the drivers changing, possibly making you unable to access your files until you wipe the hard drive and re-install Windows. When you re-install Windows everything on the boot partition will get wiped out. Make sure you back up all of your documents and such before swapping motherboards! Assuming you aren't already making responsible regular backups.
Go get a 1 Tb removable drive and copy+paste the main drive with all your shit on it. Then you won't have to worry about losing anything.
The operation was a success; the Asus mobo, FX8350, and corsair psu are humming like sweet warp-gated Galaxies. I ended up having to buy a new HDD and DVD drive since my old ones were so old that they had no SATA support. So, I went with a clean install and it validated online without a hitch. I backed up all my media and secret horse photography collections, so all that remains is to download Planetside 2 and the rest of the staples. I can't wait to bask in the performance gains! as of now: AMD FX8350 4.0ghz Asus Sabertooth 990fx r2.0 8gb ddr3 1333 Galaxy GTS450 ^_^
