Swapping motherboard in pc - will it work?

[tricky]

Somewhat off topic, but I wondered if anyone could give me guidance.

I have a media pc at home running Vista Ultimate 32bit. I built it myself with an OEM licence of Vista.

Due to various issues, I need to rebuild the machine with a new motherboard. As I want to bring the machine up-to-date, I will be using a new processor (the motherboard uses the AM2+ socket and my older machine is 939) and new RAM. My old motherboard is an ASUS and the new one will also be ASUS.

Do you know if I will be able to reinstall the OEM license of Vista on a freshly formatted disk or will I get licensing/activation issues?

Alternatively, I could just plug in the hard disk without formatting and reinstalling the OS and hope that Vista detects all the new motherboard features without problem.

What would you recommend?

[joconnell]

Swapping in a new motherboard will definitely not work - it'll freak out a tonne of things. Especially going to a totally different chipset.

[RErender]

Reinstall, You should not have a problem reactivating, worst is you'd need to call Microsoft and say it is the same computer.

[tricky]

Many thanks.

[tricky]

Just another thought:

If I stick a new disk in my new machine and install a fresh OS, then I stick my original 500GB disk as a kind of slave, will it boot up ok? The original disk was split into two particions, C: with the OS and D: with data.

What would happen?

[dbuchhofer]

yea it'll work, thats pretty much what i've been doing for years. i just rotate hard drives and after a while wipe the old ones after its been picked clean

As to the motherboard swap.. i did do that once and it worked, it was not pretty. i did it more as an experiment to see if XP could survive the transition than anything else. I definitely would reccomend a fresh install though.