MY Intel D975XBX2(Bad Dog) motherboard decided to give up the ghost, after only 7 months, a couple of days ago. It just plain refuses to POST and no matter what I tried it was dead! I called Intel yesterday and, to my surprise, after talking to a support tech for only 5 minutes I have a new board coming this morning cross shipped by them (WOW great service!)Anyway my question is, will I have to reinstall my XP OS, FSX and everything else, or will the replacement motherboard recognize everything as it was? It's an identical MB, but I wonder if the check-sum codes will prevent some of my installed programs to run! Can I just re-register or will it require a complete reinstall?Pete S.Edit: Sorry if it's in the wrong forum, I thought I posted it to the Hardware Forum, but yet here it is!

Same board? Should be OK. Hope you had backups though.Your board going out could have corrupted your hard drive.

I have the critical items backed up, but not everything!Guess I'll find out in a while, UPS just brought my new MB to the door. Unfortunately it will have to wait a couple of hours until I run all of my honey-do errands.Pete S.

Microsoft defines a new processor as a new computer for their software licensing and validation schemes.However, there have been several reported cases of new motherboards and old processors triggering a requirement to relicense. There have also been several reported cases of it not triggering a relicense.But in both cases, even if people had to call MS and explain the issue - there have not been any trouble getting the OS or FSX revalidated.Most applications will be happy with the same model MB - though to be honest my experience is that there will be differences in the two MB. That may require new drivers for some things.I'd be much more worried about FS payware addons than a Microsoft product, though patience and understanding while explaining what happened to vendors usually gets things resolved very quickly.

If it's the same mobo and you're careful to install the cards in exactly the same slots and set up the BIOS in exactly the same way before you boot Windows, you shouldn't have any problems. If any of the resource assignments change though you're gonna have driver and IRQ #### and you'll have to reinstall.

Well , I installed the new MoBo and all looks well! The OS when first booted looked at the hardware and reinstalled some of it, but I think that was due to my switching SATA cables to different ports.So far it appears to be running everything as before, so I guess I'll just leave it alone, for now!Thanks guys, for your responses!Pete S.