Reinstalling XP after hardware upgrade

[Martin]

As I am about to upgrade my PC, including changing the
motherboard, CPU and graphics card, I suppose that it
would be best to reformat my C drive and reinstall
Windows (XP) afterwards. I had put Windows by itself in
its own partition, all my programmes and data are on
other partitions, but I now see that this is probably not
going to help me in so far as the programmes are
concerned: when I reinstall Windows from afresh none of
them will then figure in the registry. I would REALLY
like to avoid having to reinstall my programmes from
scratch if I can though and I will try tinkering with a
repair reinstall first; but if I do end up having to do a
format & reinstall, couldn't I overwrite my new registry
with backups of my current HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software
and HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software registry hives? As my
programmes would remain untouched on their separate
partition, I can't see why this wouldn't work... (not
that that means it would). Any ideas on this? Thanks,
Martin S.

[Jim Macklin]

You can and should just do an in-place reinstall of
Windows...It will install the correct drivers for your new
mobo/CPU and graphics card.
Suggest you set the video to VGA default driver before you
begin the hardware changes.

Here is the link to MS instructions...
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q315341&ID=KB;EN-US;Q315341


"Martin" > wrote in message
...
| As I am about to upgrade my PC, including changing the
| motherboard, CPU and graphics card, I suppose that it
| would be best to reformat my C drive and reinstall
| Windows (XP) afterwards. I had put Windows by itself in
| its own partition, all my programmes and data are on
| other partitions, but I now see that this is probably not
| going to help me in so far as the programmes are
| concerned: when I reinstall Windows from afresh none of
| them will then figure in the registry. I would REALLY
| like to avoid having to reinstall my programmes from
| scratch if I can though and I will try tinkering with a
| repair reinstall first; but if I do end up having to do a
| format & reinstall, couldn't I overwrite my new registry
| with backups of my current HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software
| and HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software registry hives? As my
| programmes would remain untouched on their separate
| partition, I can't see why this wouldn't work... (not
| that that means it would). Any ideas on this? Thanks,
| Martin S.