Will this work?

[Dant22185]

I am semi new to building PCs, new meaning I have not done much, but I am failure with hardware and what it does. I have a Dell PC right now and am looking to basically make it faster just for kicks. I want a new motherboard and CPU mainly with keeping all I have on my hard drive with Vista.

My question is would it be possible to still use the hard drive set up with a new motherboard setup. Would the new bios settings with the new motherboard have some kind of effect on the partition that windows resides on? I'm basically trying to tweak the computer with out having to basically buy a new copy of windows and having to reinstall it. Would everything basically in essence hook up and work as it did with the dell motherboard and CPU?

The board I have right now is a Dell, model number 0m017g. CPU is a Socket 775 LGA Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q8200.

I'm Looking to go with a EVGA nForce 790i SLI FTW Motherboard. It also has a 775 LAG Intel socket.

 

[Hefemeister]

Your case could cause problems with a new motherboard as sometimes dell cases will have issues with a standard atx mb.

Dell gave you an oem version of Vista which means it is only legitimate with the computer it was purchased with. M$ considers a new mb to be a new computer.

 

[Dant22185]

I actually am not using the OEM dell case I took everything out and put it into a full size case. So a new MB would cause issues with my copy of Vista I got from buying my dell? To me it doesnt seem like it would have any effect because I was basically looking to keep the hard drives that already have Vista on it. Basically just replacing hardware components.

 

[Hefemeister]

take a peek at sysprep to remove all hardware drivers prior to changing the mb.

 

[Dant22185]

How does sysprep help with that? To my knowledge sysprep is an OS image creator, or is there an option in there that removes hardware drivers? I thought the OS came with most of the drivers I need to run most of the computer as well, in which I have already. Also If i got the new motherboard wouldn't it just be easier to run the CD it comes with to install the drivers for the MB, or would that create some kinda conflict.