Just for youre edification. This weekend I needed to repair wifes cpu. She was running intel pIII 600 on and abit bh6 board. I replaced it with my msi kt3v athlon board with xp2100 processor. I replaced my cpu with asus a7n8x deluxe with ahthlon xp2500 barton.
On both systems I first installed equipment, then booted to cd to reinstall windows xp. It wanted to repair windows and I let it. As soon as it was done I installed via 4in1 drivers on wifes board, then installed sp1, then updated video drivers. Same as with my computer except using nforce drivers.
Both are rock solid with zero problems, and I did not have to reinstall a single program (except xp of course).
thsi is the first time I have successfully upgraded equipment without having to reinstall evrythng from scratch. All settings, favorites emails, etc
were just as before.
If this helps someone ugrade in minimal time I hope this helps. The only problem I had was getting 2 asus boards that were DOA. Other than that it was as smooth as silk.

P.S. I almost forgot. Do Not restart you're system after installing new equipment without first reinstalling windows.

It can be done as you have shown , but I went from a Via chipset to an Intel and it had issues.

Although going from Via to Via, or Intel to Intel is easier.


Grats though,

Saved you some time

DId you have to activate windows again?

I had to

I had no problems switching intel to intel, but when I switched from intel to via I had some issues, most with power management.

I can be done, but micro$oft could support this more.

If you boot up your system with the /sos switch you will see that it still loads some drivers from the previous platform like 440agp.sys .... and the viaagp.sys from the curent platform, so it consumes more memory ...

I haven't found a feature to disable or uninstall this drivers and I doubt it can be done.

yep had to activate windows again. Guess microsoft wont let us off that easy.

I'm lucky. I was able to get a full, legal version of XP Pro w/o product activation being required. A college here in town has some deal with Microsoft, and getting stuff like Office, Windows, etc, is like $10 per CD. One of my buddies got XP and saw it couldn't run on his system, so he went and sold me his copy.

I've got stuff partitioned on my machines, so I don't have to backup everything just to do a clean install. I reformat C (or whatever drive XP is gonna be on), and other stuff is left untouched.