User Comments

When changing motherboards, wiping your hard drive and starting over is totally unnecessary.  Do this only if you enjoy re-installing Windows and all of your other software.  Doing a re-format and then a full re-install is a pain, but the real problem is re-installing all those applications; finding all the disks and downloads for them, then finding all the updates (the updates rarely have file names which seem obvious months or years later), then restoring all those hundreds of custom settings and tweaks accumulated and thoughtfully applied over months or years.  Aaaggghhh!!!

It's amazing how many people will advocate and go through the process of f/disking and reformatting their hard drive when all that is needed to get their machine in top running condition again is to clean the left-over garbage out of their registry.  There is a great little program in Windows (all flavors) called RegEdit.  You can go in there and physically delete all the references to a rogue program in just a few minutes.  (Also mentioned:  “RegRepair 2000” ( www.easydesksoftware.com ); One user states “This program is totally automatic. It cleans up the registry like a fresh install.”)  [Note:  There are no doubt other registry utility programs that do this as well.]

If the motherboard swap involves the same model motherboard, no special procedures are required.  Just shutdown, replace the board, boot into BIOS, adjust BIOS settings, and reboot into Windows; (you may need to rebind the NIC).  If the hardware change involves different motherboards, then the following procedures can be used to make the change without disturbing the existing installed operating system and applications.