So for the holidays I got some petty cash, my favorite present. I knew that I wanted to put it into my rig, and I finally settled on upgrading my board from the Asus M5A97 to the Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5. My order should arrive later this week, but I was wondering what I should do to prepare for the swap, mainly:
1. My Windows install. It's my understanding that my OEM copy of 7 is tied to my motherboard. I've seen somethings about disassociating your keys from a motherboard, but I'm not sure if that's what I need to do.
2. Should I do a clean install of Windows with the new board? Windows is on it's own ssd it's not that big of a hassle for me. If this isn't something I have to do should I wipe all my drivers?
3. Should I do anything in BIOS, other than making sure everything is set to the defaults?
Any help/tips would be appreciated greatly.
As for number 1 i don't know really what to tell you with that one. as for 2, ive trued using a harddrive out of another computer and it would infinite loop boot untill it was formated. as for the bios, you shouldn't really have to do anyhting with the bios.
As for number one, you will need to call microsoft, but from what I've heard its a real pain. But I will be doing it soon, so if can, it would be great if you can post the results and how you did it.
I have personal experience with this, because my MSI board died on me and I went out to get an ASUS instead. I didn't do a clean install of windows. All I did was uninstall all of the motherboard drivers in safe mode using a free program you can download called Driver Sweeper. After that, I just installed the new board and its drivers.
Windows did complain at first about different hardware, but all I had to do was click on the little balloon notification that came up and reactivate windows with the same product key I had always used before. It's been running great ever since. I'm using an OEM copy as well btw.
The only reason to change anything in the bios is if you're going to be overclocking. Although, you probably want to check the RAM frequency and boot priority just to make sure everything checks out there.
I'll definetly update once I get everything done this weekend sometime.
Awesome, this is the Windows migration experience that I'm hoping for.
Motherboard Swap update
Everything went fine, I did a clean install of Windows 7 OEM from my 970 board to my 990FX board. Registration went fine, no calls to Microsoft required.