New Motherboard - AMD to Intel - Windows 7 questions
4 replies, posted
Okay. So my friend had a spare i7 sitting around and asked me if I wanted to buy it, of course I said yes. Its been tested and works and everything n such but time for my real question.
When I swap out motherboards and CPUs, will I have to reinstall Windows 7? and if so, will my hard drive be completely erased in the process? If you need more info ask.
Thanks!!
Don't think you need to, but I would wipe your hard drive.
I don't believe you have to reinstall Windows unless you are making HDD/SDD/RAID/etc changes. If you do, Windows will wipe any data in the partition it's on, so backup all data beforehand.
You dont. Just make sure you remove all old chipset drivers and reinstall the new.
(use driver sweeper or whatever)
Windows might ask you to re-verify as it might think it is installed on a different pc. You can do that by phone for free.
When doing significant hardware changes (completely different motherboard, cpu, etc.) it's always best to reinstall Windows to avoid problems with drivers. Even if you run those driver sweeper programs, your Windows installation will still be geared to the old hardware spec and your registry will still have tons of data on the old setup.
And despite what people said above, you can reinstall Windows without losing your data. Just tell Windows to perform an installation without formatting and it will remove the old copy of Windows and install a fresh copy. The only downside is you'll have to reinstall most of your applications, since they use the Registry to store settings.
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