I finally decided that my old MSI K8T800-Neo FSR mainboard, and with it my AMD Athlon 64 3200+ needed to be replaced, and have purchased a new mainboard, Athlon Quad Phenom PIB, and 4gb of Mushkin ddr2. My current system simply doesn't meet the hardware requirements of two of my college courses, and the upgrade should allow me to consider upgrading to Vista down the road.
I have been looking around on the internet for a safe, vetted procedure to install the new mainboard without having to completely reinstall windows - I do not have access to a Windows XP SP3 disc of any sort, and my CD burner is dead so even if I could find my sp2 disc, I wouldn't be able to slipstream a new one. Nor do I have access to the installation CDs for my programs at the moment.
I have found several threads on the net that point at using SYSPREP before installing the new mainboard, but I would prefer to have detailed instructions. I have already backed up all of the files I want to keep just in case I do have to reinstall everyhing, but the discs necessary to do that are not accessible right now.
Another problem I noticed is that the new MB only has one IDE channel (and 5 SATA), so I had to buy a new SATA DVD burner since I have two IDE HDD that work just fine. I should probably install the SATA burner first and get it's drivers installed before running SYSPREP right?
I have been looking around on the internet for a safe, vetted procedure to install the new mainboard without having to completely reinstall windows - I do not have access to a Windows XP SP3 disc of any sort, and my CD burner is dead so even if I could find my sp2 disc, I wouldn't be able to slipstream a new one. Nor do I have access to the installation CDs for my programs at the moment.
I have found several threads on the net that point at using SYSPREP before installing the new mainboard, but I would prefer to have detailed instructions. I have already backed up all of the files I want to keep just in case I do have to reinstall everyhing, but the discs necessary to do that are not accessible right now.
Another problem I noticed is that the new MB only has one IDE channel (and 5 SATA), so I had to buy a new SATA DVD burner since I have two IDE HDD that work just fine. I should probably install the SATA burner first and get it's drivers installed before running SYSPREP right?