BleepingComputer.com: Os Upgrade Needed? (please Say No..)

I am going to be essentially creating a new comp in my current full tower alienware case, with the exception of my hard drive which works great. My concern is that i have heard that either the motherboard or RAM (both?) are often tied to your operating system. I REALLY do not wish to deal with upgrading to vista and dealing with the nonsense i have heard that entails...currently running XP pro, would be thrilled if i could continue to do so with my new hardware. Hopefully someone can shed some light on this...my tech level is reasonably high but not quite that high =p. At the moment i'm going with an asus board, ATI based gfx card, dual core 2.66 P4, and 2gb of kingston ddr2 pc800 RAM.

You should plan on reinstalling the OS, most times you will need to, then again if the chip set of the new motherboard is close enough you could get away with using the repair disk. I would back up everything that you want to keep and just reinstall the OS. You are also going to need to contact M$ to have them recognize the new system that it will be working in, otherwise they will no recognize it and you will not be able to get updates.

This link will explain this problem in greater detail.

This post has been edited by dc3: 16 September 2007 - 02:33 AM

Contacting Microsoft After a system upgrade is pretty straight forward and easy. They just ask why your calling and take you through the activation process. I have done this several times with motherboard changes and system upgrades including everything but the HDD. As DC3 posted to if you have an OEM installation your not "supposed" to re-use the licensing Key with the new components. I have flat out told Microsoft that the computer is completely upgraded and they still activate the software, they only ask if its on more than one machine.