[King_Vijaya]

Motherboard of my computer damaged recently. I am planning to replace it with new one. I am planning to use my old CPU (AMD XP 1900+, sound card, VGA card and hard disks, netwrok card and DVD writers etc. Can i specially use my old hadr disks (there are 2 hard disks) without changing operating system (Win XP SP2, drivers, and data. Do i need to reformat the hadr disk? Pl advic e.

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More than likely you have IDE hard drives, and a AGP video card. If you want to use these in a new computer you will need to make sure the new MB had 2 IDE connections and a AGP slot. Most of the newest MB's have only 1 IDE connection and 2 to 4 SATA hard drive connections. They also usually have PCI-E slots instead of a AGP slot. Another thing to think about is the new MB's usually use the newest DDR2 memory while you computer probably has PC 100 memory. You may have to buy newer type of memory. Your PCI cards, CDrom and dvdrom drives you can reuse. You may not need the network card as most new MB's have built-in network connections. It would be better to wipe the drive and reinstall Windows as the chipsets on the new motherboard will be different. I tried this without a reinstall and ended up having problems with the computer thinking i had both chipsets in the computer. I have not had any problems with microsoft activation after changing the motherboard. MS will let you reinstall up to 5 times before you have to call someone to give the reason why you need to reactivate.

SRX660

[SRX660]

More than likely you have IDE hard drives, and a AGP video card. If you want to use these in a new computer you will need to make sure the new MB had 2 IDE connections and a AGP slot. Most of the newest MB's have only 1 IDE connection and 2 to 4 SATA hard drive connections. They also usually have PCI-E slots instead of a AGP slot. Another thing to think about is the new MB's usually use the newest DDR2 memory while you computer probably has PC 100 memory. You may have to buy newer type of memory. Your PCI cards, CDrom and dvdrom drives you can reuse. You may not need the network card as most new MB's have built-in network connections. It would be better to wipe the drive and reinstall Windows as the chipsets on the new motherboard will be different. I tried this without a reinstall and ended up having problems with the computer thinking i had both chipsets in the computer. I have not had any problems with microsoft activation after changing the motherboard. MS will let you reinstall up to 5 times before you have to call someone to give the reason why you need to reactivate.

SRX660

[Neil Jones]

MS will let you reinstall up to 5 times before you have to call someone to give the reason why you need to reactivate.

You can reinstall it until the cows come home. There is no limit.

The only two limits on activation are:

1) Licence keys for OEM machines always require a phone call, as the machines would have originally been used with a corporate key that doesn't match the one on the side of the case.

2) If one is trying to activate less than 120 days since the previous activation.