I'm now looking to upgrade my PC with a new I77 mobo with new 8gb ram and an i5 processor, the question is, do I need to do anything technical regarding operating system and or bios, or is it as straight forward as just plug and play? Where's Durge?
Its pretty straightforward. Put it all together and reinstall OS. You should not need to change anything in bios (maybe some small things like boot priority).
I actually transplanted my system disk from a computer that died into entirely new build, fired it up and bar the need to install the new drivers and uninstall old that was it the OS and all software survived the move...I just did it to see if it would and was surprised it worked. Saved a lot of time and hunting and downloading I can tell you.
Nothing lost by going for it mate, I'm sure it brakes all kinds of rules...but hey it sometimes pays off
There is a chance it will work by installing a drive with a working version of Windows onto a new motherboard. There are things you can do to make the transition smoother. First off, when you boot the drive don't let it go into normal Windows. Keep pressing F8 when you turn the computer on to get into safe mode. In safe mode, remove drivers for the motherboard by going to device manager and uninstalling those drivers. Reboot the system and make sure that you have your driver disk in your drive so that Windows can search there for new drivers. Once you have gotten all the way into Windows, have a look in device manager and see if there are any yellow ! marks. Those will be the drivers that didn't get installed. Run the install from your drivers disk for all motherboard drivers to be sure all are up to date. If you are unable to complete this operation you can be sure that at some point you will get blue screens. It might not happen immediately but it will happen. If you were unable to install the drivers you will be looking at having to reinstall the OS.
Something I used to do at work. No harm in chucking the old drive in and seeing if it works. Not ideal but well handy if you're short on time or impatient. Running the 'Windows Repair' thingy from the install disk helps many systems through any initial problems.
First do a image of your hardrive before you touch anything just in case you need PC working. With TtrueImage you can backup and restore a hardrive partition/s in as little as 2 minutes ( 20GB ) Gear is right with W7/W8 it is easy to uninstall all drivers do a bit of a clean up then reboot with new hardware. As well as suggested repair can't hurt to try. Obviously I and others replying would recommend a fresh OS on a fresh partitioned drive. Keep C drive as small as you can but with 50% free space Even though SSD does not need space for defrag the blocks get written sooner rather then later and in a few months it will start to slow in benchtests. Do images backups with True Image or other software like Clonezilla or Ghost. I was going to rant on about how to keep a SSD to its max. performance ( there is only one way ) When someone here does a re-install and notices their SSDs experience rating has dropped from 7.9 or from 7.6 for SSD2 , etc. I will explain. My C drive is 33GB , 17.5 GB used and takes less then 2 minutes to restore. ........smokin'
