Hello Everyone,In three weeks time, it's pay day so I'm starting to do some research on my next purchase - a new motherboard. Basically I'm wanting a motherboard with an 8x AGP slot and a 400Mhz FSB so I can buy an Athlon XP 3000/3200+ later on. If my Radeon 9800Pro that I bought this month works any quicker, that would be a nice bonus.So here's my question. Can I simply plug my hard drive into the new moterboard and start windows up normally - or do I have to format and reinstall Windows XP? My current motherboard is the MSI KT3 Ultra 2 with the VIA KT333 chipset. I'm looking at getting a motherboard with an NVidia nForce2 chipset, probably Gigabyte's board with the dual bios.Any info on this would be gratefully received.

Hi Anthony,no, XP will not boot properly. However, you won't need to reformat and do a complete reinstall, on the XP CD, there is an option for a 'repair' install, which will leave all your programs intact, it will just update the registry etc. But there could be issues with software that uses machine binding/product activation etc. You may be better off uninstalling those before you upgrade, and then reinstall them.As to the motherboard, I have the Asus A7N8X and I'm very happy with it (no dual BIOS, though).Cheers,Gosta.http://hifi.avsim.net/activesky/images/wxrebeta.jpg

The Gigabyte nForce boards are rubbish. Go with the Asus A7NX8 or EPoX 8RDA+

>Go with the Asus A7NX8 Thanks for the recommendation, cheaper than the Gigabyte I was looking at. On dabs.com there are three variants A7N8X-X

I recommend this board:http://www.guru3d.com/article/mainboard/66/1..not cheap, but by no means rubbishAnandtech described it as the "most feature-rich board we've ever tested" - here:http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1836&p=1EDIT: here's a Toms review of 10 nForce boards (inluding the one above):http://www20.tomshardware.com/motherboard/...0721/index.html...and Techseekers:http://www.techseekers.net/modules.php?nam...owcontent&id=57Cheers,Paulhttp://www.strontiumdog.plus.com/sbird.jpgOfficially licenced by British Airways plc for use of name and logo[p]AMD XP2800+ Barton, GA-7NNXP nForce2, 1Gig Crucial PC3200 DDR 400MHz, Gainward 128 MB GF4-4200, SB Audigy, 3 x WD Caviar SE[/p]

>I recommend this board:>>http://www.guru3d.com/article/mainboard/66/1>>..not cheap, but by no means rubbishYes that's the one I saw, it did look pricey at

Does the Asus board also offer RAID/two extra IDE ports?Cheers,Paulhttp://www.strontiumdog.plus.com/sbird.jpgOfficially licenced by British Airways plc for use of name and logo[p]AMD XP2800+ Barton, Gigabyte GA-7NNXP nForce2, 1Gig Crucial PC3200 DDR 400MHz, Gainward 128 MB GF4-4200, SB Audigy, 3 x WD Caviar SE[/p]

>there is>an option for a 'repair' install, which will leave all your>programs intact, Thanks for the advice. Though in case I do find reinstalling more 'system optimised', do you know where all the 'Windows Update' downloads store themselves?>As to the motherboard, I have the Asus A7N8X and I'm very>happy with it (no dual BIOS, though).Had a look at that, looks good (the Deluxe Variant). Here's another question. I bought 1GB of pc2700 Ram back in August. Now this is 333MHz DDR memory, will this work with 400Mhz FSB CPU's or do I have to start all over with faster memory modules? I wonder about this, the latest Intel motherboards have 800Mhz FSB's, but take DDR memory? Would I be better off going for an XP3000+ with 333Mhz FSB rather than one with a 400Mhz FSB?

>Does the Asus board also offer RAID/two extra IDE ports?It has something called 'serial ATA'. I presume serial ATA is a faster data transfer potocol for hard drives?http://www.dabs.com/products/prod-info3-in...&quicklinx=28L9I'm not 'upto speed' on Hard Drives (no pun intended). My current drive is an 80GB IDE. Other than knowing it spins at 7200RPM, I don't know how fast it's data transfer speeds are.What is RAID? I get the impression it's two disk drives storing the same data for backup purposes? Does that make data access faster?

>>Does the Asus board also offer RAID/two extra IDE ports?>>It has something called 'serial ATA'. I presume serial ATA is>a faster data transfer potocol for hard drives?>http://www.dabs.com/products/prod-info3-in...&quicklinx=28L9You're right. The gigabyte board also has SATA. But the hard drives have to be SATA-capable. You can't just rip out your old IDE ones.>I'm not 'upto speed' on Hard Drives (no pun intended). My>current drive is an 80GB IDE. Other than knowing it spins at>7200RPM, I don't know how fast it's data transfer speeds are.It could be anything, you'd need to know more info about your drives (make, model,etc) then look up the details on the manufacturers site.>What is RAID? I get the impression it's two disk drives>storing the same data for backup purposes? Does that make>data access faster?it can make it faster - this is debatable really.Here's a bit more info: http://www.compulink.co.uk/~davedorn/compu...at/eideraid.htmCheers,Paulhttp://www.strontiumdog.plus.com/sbird.jpgOfficially licenced by British Airways plc for use of name and logo[p]AMD XP2800+ Barton, Gigabyte GA-7NNXP nForce2, 1Gig Crucial PC3200 DDR 400MHz, Gainward 128 MB GF4-4200, SB Audigy, 3 x WD Caviar SE[/p]

Hi Anthony,if you installed the Windows updates via the update option within XP, the downloads themselves won't be stored anywhere, it just downloads everything to a temporary folder, installs it, then deletes the temp folder. So you'd have to download and install them again. In the case of SP1, you could actually download and save it, before installing. But then, you would have had to select the location, where to save it to.Yes, the A7N8X does allow you to run RAM and CPU at different FSB speeds. However, you will get the best performance by running them synchronised, for example a 333MHz XP3000+ with PC2700 RAM will give you much better performance than a 400MHz XP3000+ and PC2700 RAM. So, if you don't want to upgrade your RAM as well, I'd go with the 333MHz CPU. Cheers,Gosta.http://hifi.avsim.net/activesky/images/wxrebeta.jpg