Though time-consuming, the rest of the disassembly went fairly smoothly. I removed excess lighting from the case (I used to be more into case-modding), dusted, and popped in the new motherboard. As I was popping PCI cards back in, I noticed what the grinding noise had been coming from. The fan on my video card was almost completely destroyed. So I hunted around, and was lucky enough to find one that was almost a perfect fit (and people say being a pack-rat is dumb).
I put everything back together, zip-tied all the cables to get everything out of the way, and tried to boot.
Nothing. Not a thing. I looked behind the machine and turned on the power supply. A brief flash, then nothing. I spent ten minutes poking and proding, and nothing worked. Then, suddenly, success! The lights turned on, the fans whirred to life, and my computer booted to a “No OS Found” screen. I couldn’t tell you how I got it to work, because I honestly didn’t do anything special. But work it does, and I spent the next 3 hours loading Windows XP and all my software (still not done, either).
Of all the parts that can fail on a computer, the motherboard is the worst. As the base on which the rest of a computer is built, repairing or replacing it almost always necessitates taking the rest of the computer apart. This process is time-consuming, often hazardous (ask anyone who has ever run a finger across a sharp interior case edge), and only minimally fun (and that only the first 5 or 6 times you do it). In the end you will probably have a more powerful, quieter computer, as I now do. But you’ll also have a headache, maybe a couple of cuts, and hours of software loading to do.
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Why would replacing the motherboard require you to reinstall Windows XP?
When I was using linux, I used to dump my filesystems on CD-ROMs (this was back when my drive was only 8GB, so the compressed dump fit on ~10 cds, not so bad) and then just restore from those whenever I needed to replace my HDD — just boot off one cd-rom or the floppy, then run restore and start feeding the machine cds. (^_^)
You *could* technically just pop in the new motherboard, boot windows, and load up new drivers.
I say you *could*, but I wouldn’t recommend it. I’ve gone that route before, and thanks to the way drivers and stuff are handled in Windows, it hasn’t always worked right. While the orphaned libraries and other files are almost tolerable (unless you are enormously anal about such things, as I am), orphaned registry entries are often more trouble than they are worth, attempting to start hardware that isn’t there and calling software that is no longer tied to hardware. Overall, the performance hit and odd glitches that may come up just isn’t worth it.
Plus, unlike the various *nix flavors, Windows works best with a fresh install every year or so. It’s a ‘feature’.
You *could* install the new motherboard, boot into safe mode, remove the old devices, then install the new drivers. Which would eliminate any chance that future boot sequences would attempt to start-up devices that were no longer present.
Or you could go through all the trouble of reinstalling Windows for no reason…
Heh. Spoken like a man who truly expects things to work right from an OS.
Have you ever tried actually uninstalling devices and software, even in Safe Mode? I have, and let me tell you, as much as Windows claims you’ve removed every bit of it, it’s funny how a simple stroll through the registry will yield dozens of entries that were not, in fact, removed.
Besides, loading Windows itself takes no more time than doing what you suggested, even with the few drivers I had to install. It’s mostly the software reinstalls and tweaking that suck up all that time.
So, what’s the big obession with orphaned registry keys anyway? Oh no, they’re taking up valuable disk space! Or something.
As for devices, I’ve uninstalled them before without a problem. Really it’s up to the authors of the drivers to make sure that uninstall works properly; it has almost nothing to do with Microsoft or with Windows XP.
As for the amount of time required, I’d expect that reinstalling all of your software could take quite a long time. I’ve heard rumors that Microsoft will adopt Mac OS style packages for applications in Longhorn: all of the resources needed for the application to run, global configuration, etc., are stored inside an archive file that looks and acts just like a plain ol’ exe. Double-click on it and it runs, copy it to the hard drive and it’s “installed”.
I think those will stay rumors, unless Microsoft is going to help all of us developers port our code away from from using the registry…
My obsession comes from liking a clean machine. Which ‘doze doesn’t encourage.
Colin was telling me about the MacOS package system. Just a simple exe and all. Like some of the very simple tiny programs written by good programmers for Windows. I tell you, it was almost enough to make me see Macs in a different light. It may yet convince me where nothing else would.
And would Microsoft really need to do that? Couldn’t they create a compatibility mode with some sort of virtual registry? Hrm, on second thought, that wouldn’t work for gigantic mega-mega apps, since it would probably increase load times significantly, having to possibly create a registry every time you start an app.
I’m not sure what you mean when you’re talking about a “virtual registry”. Presumably Microsoft could map attempts to change the (former) registry with calls that actually modified the contents of a package (or like on Terminal Services, a private copy of portions of the registry for each user) at little to no performance penalty (as I hinted, it does this for applications runnign on a TS platform already).
So yeah, Microsoft could do that; it falls under the category of “helping us to port” our applications to their new package system, when and if it’s ever developed.
Of course, packages defeat the purpose of shared libraries, but disk space is hardly at a premium in this day and age.