Windows 7, meet new motherboard.

[bean]

Alright.. I know with pretty much every other version of Windows, a new motherboard means a new installation.

Unfortunately, this motherboard is about to die from what I can tell. The PC randomly shuts off with no warning (yes, I've swapped power supplies), occasionally locks up, and there's a few capacitors on the board that are leaking.

I have another motherboard with the same chipset, but it's a different brand. What kind of hurt am I in for when I try to swap it? Everything else will remain the same.

Windows 7 x64 Home Premium.

[Der Cute]

You can try.

XP is the one that started the hardware related lock for the software. I think, the worst that could happen is that W7 would start popping up notes of "You Must Certify or Register This Product" kind of nagware.

Try the board with the power, vid and hd, and see what you get when you boot up. If it doesn't argue, go ahead with a full hardware install and get the wires all situated.

Cutenoob

[bean]

I did find some registry hacks to remove all hardware info and force 7 to re-detect all of the hardware, so I'll give that a shot.

I know I'll have to re-activate my copy of Windows, but since it's a legit, retail copy, that shouldn't be a problem.

Also, it's powered off 4 times since I posted that message. It's definitely something heat related - if I start gaming, it shuts off pretty quick, but if it's idling, it can go for days. I've swapped the power supply, cleaned the cpu heatsink and fan (cpu temps are about average for this kind of system), swapped ram, swapped video.. the only things I haven't swapped are the cpu and motherboard, and hard drives.

It's definitely not a proper shutdown - about 2 seconds before it shuts off, anything connected via USB craps out (I've even removed everything USB trying to troubleshoot it) and a bunch of errors about unrecognized hardware start popping up, then it shuts off.

Argh.

edit: fuck it, it just died again. swapping motherboards right now since I have nothing better to do and I'd enjoy actually being able to play some games today.

[bean]

Turns out, getting the motherboard to use my PCI Express video card was the most difficult part. Last time I used this motherboard, I had it setup to only use onboard VGA - and my monitor only has a DVI input. Had to drag an ancient CRT VGA monitor out of my closet so I could get into the bios setup long enough to tell it "hey dummy, use the PCI-x card".

Used my registry hack to remove all hardware drivers, and it's currently installing the majority of them, and I'm on the first boot right now.

[Eric the Grey]

Well, it may be too late now, but for future reference, changing motherboards is only mildly annoying under Win7 (and Vista for that matter). I've done it under each.

Windows will auto-detect most everything, but you may have to download or install motherboard drives. After that, they run fine for a few days, but will eventually complain that your copy of windows is not genuine. You may still get this.

If you click on the bubble, it'll tell you how to fix the problem. It involves calling Microsoft and giving them a long string of numbers, and then typing in another long string of numbers. After this, you're good to go.

I don't know how the registry hack will affect this process.


Eric the Grey