XP Drive Swapping

Believe it or not, my son did this about a year ago with WinXP Home edition and it went flawlessly. The 2 computers were both custom built, with completely different Motherboards. I did have to call and re-activate windows, but that was painless too. Not a single piece of hardware was conflicting in the "Device Manager". It was an athlon 2200 on a biostar motherboard with an ATI VIdeo card.

It sometimes works and sometimes it doesn't...

http://motherboard.windowsreinstall.com/problems.htm

Unless the 2 PCs are very similar, be prepared to do a repair install of XP on both PCs.

As a minimum, both motherboards must have the same chipset to have any chance of a painless swap.

If SP2 has been installed, you will need an OEM XP CD with SP2 incorporated. If you do not have one or cannot borrow one, SP2 can be slipstreamed onto your CD.

XP Repair Install

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Slipstream SP2

http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsXP/winxp-sp2-bootcd.html

Dalton

Windows will ask you to re-activate if you change enough components of the computer. If you only change the hard drive you will be okay. When Win XP starts it searches for unique id numbers created by your hardware, if enough of the hardware is the same windows will start, if to much has been altered you will need to re-activate Windows. I may be wrong but I think that Windows needs 7 positive votes from hardware id's in order to start, and the network card actually counts as three votes. Other components that will be checked include the hard drive, motherboard, processor, video card, and ram.

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