Motherboard replacement

[tom_stang]

I've recently acquired a Soyo BX board and plan on installing the board, 256 PC100 RAM, and a P3 600mhz, into an existing (working) system using a board with an LX chipset running Win95 sr2. I would normally format the hard drive(s) and start from scratch, but I can't get my family to agree to give up the present state of their system. My question, does anyone know of a good procedure (or a recommended web site) that would guide me through the replacement of the motherboard without formatting and starting from scratch. Thanks

[Reid]

I recently upgraded from a K6-III/450 on an EPOX EP-MVP3C to a Thunderbird 850 on an MSI K7T Pro-2A. I was going to do a fresh installation of Win98SE, but decided to see how it would act on boot-up. It just redetected the chipset and updated drivers and ran with no problems.

I don't know what chipsets you have, so results may vary. Hang on for a while and see what other people recommend.

------------------
reido@my-deja.com

Friends don't let friends install Windows ME

[ComputerMan]

My experience with Soyo motherboards has been terrible (like 15% sucess), as far as I'm concerned, they are the worst mobo on the market. Comparable to my experiences with Seagate HDD's. I wish you the best of luck. You SHOULD just be able to make the change without the dump though, best way may be to try it and see what happens. Bios and windows setup should do most of the tasks for you.

------------------
Who? Me?

computerMan

[Paleo Pete]

My experience with Soyo has been the exact opposite, the board this one replaced was a Soyo with someone else's name on it, and was twice the board this one is. I'm going to try and get a printer port to work on it so I can put it back in this machine.

When I changed boards, I left everything as it was and booted up. Windows took about 30 minutes finding and installing components and drivers, and after giving it a test drive I formatted and reinstalled Windows the next day, it was nothing but one problem after another.

In other cases you can swap boards, Windows will install new drivers and so forth, and it will work fine. It all depends on the motherboard itself, no way to know until you try it.

I always recommend formatting and starting over, which is where backups come in very handy.

------------------
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines!
Note: Please post your questions on the forums, not in my email.

Computer Information Links

[Randy_tx]

If I read your post correctly....you are currently running Win95-B. If you want to "preserve" everything on that Hard Drive and make the mobo change, I would install Win98 SE upgrade PRIOR to making the mobo switch....then it will probably do ok.

------------------
"As hard as a rock & dumb as a brick"...Windows CEMeNT

[tom_stang]

Thanks for the replies. I am presently trying to grab a copy of Win98 SE for this particular machine. I can't believe an upgrade of 98 is still going to cost me $80+. Thanks again.