I want to upgrade my entire system but not reinstall windows

[childofthetao]

Hi, I want to upgrade pretty much my entire system except for my video card and my hard drives, mouse and keyboard. I read somewhere that someone did this, they booted into safe mode, removed all the drivers, upgraded and windows loaded fine, and operated fine.

I really don't want to format my drive.

 

[Gman450]

Well, you can do that, no problem.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/263775-28-replace-reinstalling

 

[proxy711]

Buy a external or another HDD and backup your data to the other drive. Reformat and install a fresh OS to go along with the new components.

Just removing drivers in safe mode just scratches the surface of what will be left over from the old system. You'll have a lot of registry gunk left over which will slow your system down.

Plus this way if you ever have a HDD fail on you, you have a backup so you don't lose your data completely.

 

[Guest]

after you upgrade you may want to consider getting driver sweeper
http://phyxion.net/item/driver-sweeper.html
and ccleaner
http://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER

to remove the old drivers and the registry entries to them.

 

[childofthetao]

Thanks for the help.

Has anyone here changed motherboards without re-installing windows? Can you comment on the slow-own this can cause?

 

[mathew7]

I have not tried this with Win7, but for WinXP, a "repair install" worked the 2 times I tried it.
But I'm thinking about the sysprep tools that MS offers. They can remove any system-specific settings, but I don't know about user settings (by default user profiles are also removed).

 

[Gman450]

Thanks for the help.

Has anyone here changed motherboards without re-installing windows? Can you comment on the slow-own this can cause?

If changing the entire system, I would recommend a clean re-install of the OS. I don't think it'll cause slowdowns, but it might cause some or a lot of files to go corrupt. So just backup important files and then do a reformat.