I'm upgrading the CPU, Motherboard, and RAM in my PC (going from an AMD Athlon II X2 240 to an FX 6300, and 4GB DDR2 to 8GB DDR3, and a Gigabyte M68M-S2P to Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P incase you're interested :). I would like to not have to reinstall Windows 8.1 in order to do this. I've heard that uninstalling motherboard related drivers in device manager works. I also heard that running sysprep.exe works. What should I do?
Just to clarify, I have only 1 hard drive, so the OS and all my files are on the same disk (I'm coming for you next, SSD!).
Its better to reinstall after changing motherboards and most the time its the only option. If you swap boards and don't reinstall, windows will most likely blue screen on every boot.
You could partition the drive, move your important data to the second partition and reinstall on the first. That is assuming you have enough space available to do that.
Yeah windows will get really messed up going from motherboard to motherboard if its a different chipset. You can go from a Z97 to Z97 without much problem, or a 990fx to 990fx, but it gets really bad going from any chipset to any other chipset.
I've found that as long as you uninstall drivers first, and don't let Windows update install anything afterwards, you're fine. But be sure to have CCLeaner or some other Registry cleaner once you get the new stuff installed to clean up anything that's broken. That's what'll get you blue screens.
That might work, but I still don't recommend it. I have successfully gone from p67 - z77 without reinstalling, but it ended up getting horrible performance later down the track - it was my brothers PC - I told him I didn't care if he wanted to reinstall or not, it was happening anyway.
I made the jump from a Pentium 4 Northwood (can't remember the chipset name) to a Core i5 3570k on a Z77 once and the only thing that didn't work properly was the Ubuntu 10.04 installation. The Windows XP installation survived!
It's possible to do a whole system swap without reinstall. But... for the love of Azura, don't do it! It's easier to just reinstall, even if you do that partition trick mentioned above so your stuff isn't moved, than trying to get it to work as well as if you had reinstalled. In my experience you want your coding as clean as possible, otherwise... Which of your kids are you sacrificing to Sithis?