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Mainboard chipset driver question

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Guest Dominik Mann

Well, as some of you might remember, I shall be upgrading my system with a new mainboard and CPU in the near future. The items I set my eyes on are the ASUS A7N8X board with an Athlon XP 2500 CPU. However, there was a question that had been nagging me for days, and I think it might be smarter if I asked it before doing any "surgery" on my machine.Is it wise (or even necessary) to uninstall the chipset drivers for my current mainboard (ASUS A7V133 with VIA chipset) before swapping over to the new board? And if so, how should I do this?Cheers & thanks,

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Hi Dominik.A tip about the ASUS board:If you have problems getting the Motherboard to post after you install it, remove it, replace your old MoBo, and return the defective board back to the store. Some internet discussions boards will tell you to force a CMOS clearing by removing the battery..etc... Don't believe it. The board is bad if it doesn't work immediately.Fully 20% of these Nvidia-based boards are defective. You'll know if you have one! I spent a few days struggling with mine.. thinking I had a bad CPU or defective memory. I ended up getting a Gigabyte KT400 via-type board, and everything posted and booted perfectly with the CPU and memory I had bought. WindowsXP requested a registration of the new setup, and I elected an internet connection to MS, and it was done in seconds.I had moved from a KT133 Mobo to the KT400... I had no problems with any drivers updating... except Windows did start and reboot several times, without warning. I just let it do that, and eventually WindowsXP sorted out everything on it's own.Currently my system is very stable... but it is not as fast as some overtweaked systems you'll read about. Gigabyte is the turtle in the speed race, but ended up finishing. The ASUS board ( the hare ) laid down and went to sleep on me. It was junk. I could have exchanged the ASUS for another one, but I read too many horror stories about replacements being defective.If you are willing to take the chance, the ASUS board can be very fast. Just don't be shocked, if it doesn't work out of the box. Dick

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Guest FPSFREAK

Dom, I just finished building almost the exact same system for a freind of mine and I can tell you that the board rocks. I experienced no problems out of the box as the above post states. Maybe it was good luck on my part but this is the 4th system I have built with this MB as part of the platform and not one of them was bad. I feel that 20% of all Nvidia based boards may have been bad but I don't think 20% of just the asus alone were bad. As far as removing the drivers I have never had any problems although only 3 of those machines were upgrades. If you have the time and are willing to put in a little bit of work the best route would be a complete fresh redo. I call it a spring cleaning. This isn't neccesary but in my opinion if your going through the trouble of doing a MB/mem upgrade why not start fresh. One thing you may want to take note of is if you are using two sticks of Mem w the board some of the first ones seemed a little picky about the arrangement of the sticks in the dimm slots. Pay strict attention to the manual and you should have no problems.Bobby

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Guest Dominik Mann

Bobby,did I understand you correctly that those machines you rebuilt were originally running with a different kind of chipset, and that you could remove the old chipset drivers before switching over to the new board without any problems?My OS is Win 2000 Pro, if that should be of relevance as well :-) .

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Three ways to remove the chipset drivers if VIA. First, check the Windows control panel, add/remove programs menu to see if there is an entry to remove the drivers. Second, get the VIA driver download package and run the install program. I am pretty sure their is an option to delete/remove drivers. Third, if using WinXP, conduct a repair/reinstall. It usually installs the Windows default drivers for the chips installed. You will probably need to conduct a repair/reinstall anyway after you switch MOBOs because there will be other drivers that need changing.Personally, I recommend wiping the OS clean and start with a fresh installation vice trying to repair/reinstall. It is a pain because of your other installed applications but it produces a fresh clean registry from which you can start to corrupt it!!:-lol

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Guest Dominik Mann

Well, as far as I found out meanwhile, there is an uninstall option in the VIA driver package, so I figure that shouldn't be the problem. As for the repair/reinstall - I am pretty sure in remembering seeing such an option on the blue DOS-like installer background when I first installed my Win 2000. Is that the option I should go for?

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Guest FPSFREAK

Dominick, You may find that you will wind up reinstalling your OS as Win2K does not take kindly to very radical Hardware Changes. You can try uninstalling the VIA drivers and going that route. Worst case scenario is your stuck doing a fresh install in the end anyway.Good Luck,Bobby

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Guest Dominik Mann

Bobby,just asked the same question on another forum, but does this reinstall mean simply installing Win 2K on top of the existing installation in this case, or will it only accept a total reformat of the boot partition?

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Generally, if you try to install a new version of windows on a hardrive that already has a windows installation at drive:Windows, the new installation will ask you were you want to put the new installation and give a recommendation, i.e., drive:Windows.000. You can change this to the first installation folder. I don't know if this will cause the default (first) folder to be formatted or overwritten with the default files.As I indicated above, it is usually better to wipe the default installation clean and start fresh anyway.

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Guest

Good luck - I'm still awaiting Canpar for my sys spec - damn them guys are slow.

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