homemade noize

I try to keep this blog related to music but this entry is purely about computers. You’re all using computers right? It is such a good tip I could not resist.

I am a PC guy by choice. I like to tweak customize and upgrade. It also is makes economic sense. You can upgrade the components to keep up with the times without throw the whole thing or having to reinstall your programs(and go through the reauthorizing process for each of them) or transfer all your media, documents and settings over to a new machine. Not for everyone I know but great for some of us.

The thing that makes upgrading less attractive to me and other people is having to reload the OS or attempt to use the a repair disk to get the OS to work when you are changing out a motherboard. It is usually a much bigger pain than actually changing out the mobo which is basically a few screws and plugging is a few cables.

I have read and so many place that a clean wipe and do a fresh of the hard drive is the only way to go. “They” say there will be problems any other way. Others suggest you’ll need some kind of boot CD either a custom repair disk or the Windows CD to get make things possible. This what I have done in the past. Most of what I read recommended some version of this. I have found ways to make it less painful to reinstall windows like slipstreaming (a good idea to do as a backup anyway.) But I have found all these to be unnecessary.

I have since searched and found the method I used a few other places on the Internet but it is out numbered by others. I worked for me using XP I have no idea about other OS’s. I found it from Windows XP A to Z. You simple change the the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller. You can find the same method in a little detail here. Note that the terminology for the standard IDE controller you want might vary a little form the examples but you should be able to tell which one it is. I even forgot to restart in safe mode and it still worked. The one thing I will add is you should download new drivers from your motherboards manufacturers website before the change out. The drivers on CD that came with the mobo will most likely be out of date (almost any driver disk is outdated) and it you’ll have the most current drivers available to install immediately.

There was no need to mess with the BIOS, boot order or a repair disk. A few minutes to install the drivers a restart and that was that. Great.