Posted: 3/13/2008 11:46:46 AM EDT
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I have a Dell with a P4 2.66 Ghz Processor and my friend has a Dell with a P4 3.06 Ghz HT Processor. All of the stock parts in my computer look the same as his computer. Can I take my Hardrives, DVDRWCDRW, RAM, Video Card, and USB 2.0 card and put it in his computer? What do I need to worry about? Any advice/suggestions? Forgot to add, His computer only has the motherboard, 1 stick of RAM, Processor, power supply, Ethernet card, and CD/DVD drives(which I'm going to remove). |
Shouldnt have any problems. |
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You will want to get drivers for all that hardware from the Dell site using your computer tag. The hardware might look the same, but it might have small differences. With the correct drivers, all your stuff should work fine in there. Those RAM sticks may not be exactly the same. |
| Please be aware that your OS is not going to work if you move the harddrive from your pc to his. It will require a reinstall. If everything is exactly the same Rev and manufacture then you may be able to get it to work by reseting the SID but that is complicated. (windows) |
Why not? |
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Every last bit of hardware would need to match exactly for there to be no problems, and even then you never know what can happen. If his OS still works, just plug the second hard drive in and find it in disk management. It would be wise to copy the useful stuff off the drive, and format it. |
Thats not true at all. If you call downloading drivers a problem, I suppose. But it will still boot. Windows may require reactivation. And for the above posters, no you WONT have to reinstall. Why on earth would you need to. |
Nah. That's what hardware profiles are for. It was a problem with win9x, but XP is just fine. Before the swap, just create a new hardware profile and boot to it after the swap. Easy peasy. |
I have had both success and failure with swapping out large numbers of components. The easiest ones were a RAM upgrade, card swaps, and such. I had a pickle of a time installing a new MB and CPU, but the new parts weren't like the older ones. I ended up having to reinstall that time. |
That was the problem. This was back in the days of Windows 98. |
| If anything, Windows will boot up and if any hardware is different, it will start all that Found New Hardware stuff until it has everything resolved. If in the device manager there are things it didn't know about or couldn't resolve, then a driver update should be all that's needed. |
I had a trick for that back in the day, too (I did this if there was a lot of software installed, and reinstalling all of it was expected to take longer than 4 hours). What I used to do was boot into safe mode, nuke EVERYTHING out of the device manager, shut down, install the new motherboard, and reboot. Windows would go through a lengthy hardware detection process (several reboots) and before you know it, I had the equivalent of a fresh 95 install, except with all the user's apps installed. Then, I'd just grab the correct drivers for everything, and voila! I used to have a neat trick for imaging machines this way. The image itself was a 95 machine, but with ALL hardware information removed from the registry (driver files themselves still present, but registry entries were gone). When I set up a new machine, I'd put this image on it, let it detect everything, then I'd install the right drivers (which essentially overwrote the files that were there, and added the proper registry entries). Then, I'd save a copy of the registry. This way, I only had to maintain one image. When I re-imaged a machine, it got this image, then I'd replace the registry with that's machine's unique registry I saved earlier. It was pretty slick. I managed 1200 workstations this way. Nowdays, it's much easier to accomplish the same thing. |
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EPIC FAIL! I put everything in all nice and neat and It didn't work. I would get some kind of error telling me that some file was missing. So I would reboot and then it would tell me that a different file was missing... So I decided to try reinstalling windows and While it was loading the installer, A message comes up telling me that a file is missing from the Install CD  ... So after a few tries of that and no luck, I put everything back into my old computer and it doesn't work. So I screw around with a few things and eventually get it to start up. But now Windows wont boot, So I had to reinstall windows .Does anyone have any clue what I should do? My motherboard is rev.A01 and the new motherboard is Rev.A01-00. What effect does the Rev have and how can I get around it? |
Is your install CD clean? Are you using the same CD-Rom Drive? Motherboard revisions are usually quite minor changes between "spins", and shouldnt be the cause at all for your problems. |