reformat reinstall windows? How important?

[yeeyoh]

Hi I just took out my Asus A7v8x-x motherboard, athlon 2600+ CPU and 768megs of DDR333 mem(1x512, 1x512).
I replaced them with an Asus AV8 motherboard, AMD64 3700+ CPU and a single stick of 1024 meg DDR400 corsair ValueSelect ram.
I put the same vid. and sound cards I was using previously sapphire 9600pro256meg AGP card. Sound blaster 24bit live.
All without reformatting or reinstalling the OS windows XP SP2 all the updates.
(So far everything seems to be working smoothly with no problems)
Finally the question, How important would it be with this type of change to reformat the harddrives and reinstall the operating system if at all.
I have reinstalled all the drivers for the new board the chip (from the AMD web site) etc.
Any help would be really appreciated.

 

[casemods]

Your fine unless you get errors and such.

If you are that worried, just format, it only takes an hour.

 

[yeeyoh]

Yeah about an hour, maybe less for Windows XP.
About a day and a half to reinstall and patch all the games and software.

I'm just hoping to hold off because I'm hoping to get a S ATA hard drive soon.
Thanks for all the input everybody though...

 

[casemods]

Yeah about an hour, maybe less for Windows XP.
About a day and a half to reinstall and patch all the games and software.

I'm just hoping to hold off because I'm hoping to get a S ATA hard drive soon.
Thanks for all the input everybody though...

How many games do you like to have installed?

I like to have BF2 installed, halo, silkroad, and AVP2.

By the way, do you have xfire?

 

[yeeyoh]

Hey,
AvP2 is one of them (love that game).
Ut2004, Quake 4, Dawn of War, Sin episodes emergence, RTCW, Max payne 1 and 2, elite force, etc. etc. etc.
The last couple of reformats/reinstalls I've tried not to reinstall everything at once, though. Seems like a better idea to just install them as I'm going to use them but its always nice to have them at the ready....
And yeah I install x-fire, but I find it a pain to have to exit a game and go back to the x-fire and back any time a server disconnects or I just want to switch to a different one (same with gamespy)[/img]

 

[krazyIvan]

As a general rule if you swap MB's you should start over, if only because the drivers are different. But if you’re experiencing no problems (and Device Manager recognizes everything correctly) go with the flow.

 

[Tyrvidar]

yah I just swapped over from a MSI-NEO2 to a A8N-SLI deluxe, no probs, all drivers installed fine. No need for a clean wipe.

 

[thelvyn]

if your computer is acting fine then theres no reason to reinstall windows.
Lucky you most times you change the mb out windows will just crash.
Well 2k+, win98 never had that problem at least
As far as your sata drive goes just get norton ghost and ghost your current drive to the sata then switch the boot order once your done. No need to reinstall windows for that.

 

[Groveling_Wyrm]

Generally, the rule of thumb that I use....

If it involves a change of the chipset, I recommend reformat and start over. If less than that...you can get by with new drivers.

Per my past experiences with this, if you try a repair of windows on a changed chipset, it will lead to problems down the road.

Now saying that, I have successfully changed out motherboards that have used the same basic chipset and been lucky, but if it involves a totally different chipset....then no luck.

 

[casemods]

To be honest, I have taken hard drives from pc's and put them in other pc's and they worked fine, all I had to do was call up microsoft to update the key or w/e it is you need to do, it's been so long since I have had to do that since I got myself a copy of XP