I'm in the process of deciding on a CPU upgrade which will require a new motherboard.  Will I have to do any uninstalling and reinstalling of P3D v4.5 and/or addons?  I fly the PMDG 737 with Active Sky Next, Pilot2ATC, ORBX Global Base Pack Scenery, EZDok.  

Bob

With that kind of hardware change you will have to reinstall Windows, not just P3D.

If you have all your flightsim stuff on separate drives (not C:\) you should be able to re-use them after a new Windows install. 

Try just installing the P3D Client and run it once.  After that, run your P3D exe from your old disk drive/SSD and see if any of your addons complain..

You should likely back up your current P3D Addons folder (in Documents) and your current Scenery.cfg file and copy them to your new system. 

59 minutes ago, Speedbird 217 said:

With that kind of hardware change you will have to reinstall Windows, not just P3D.

I did not reinstall Windows when I changed out my mobo/CPU last time for my 8700K build.  Windows picked up on the hardware change and all I had to do was re-authenticate my license I believe... based on memory.

Release your P3D license, then after rebuild you should simply have to re-authenticate and not have to reinstall.

However, as Bert replied, if you reinstall windows then everything gets reinstalled.

Edited July 12, 20196 yr by downscc

22 minutes ago, downscc said:

I did not reinstall Windows when I changed out my mobo/CPU last time for my 8700K build.  Windows picked up on the hardware change and all I had to do was re-authenticate my license I believe... based on memory.

Release your P3D license, then after rebuild you should simply have to re-authenticate and not have to reinstall.

However, as Bert replied, if you reinstall windows then everything gets reinstalled.

Is it possible? Yes.

Is it good practice or recommended? No.

Building a new system is a great opportunity to start with a fresh OS installation. It also ensures you won’t run into any issues later.

Just swapping out the parts and running the old system may work, may seemingly work and develop issues later (or under certain circumstances) or not work at all. It may also reduce some of the performance gains you could see with new hardware and new OS.

YMMV and do whatever makes you happy, I always start with a clean OS when building a new system.

A colleague of mine also changed almost his whole hardware some time ago. Mobo, CPU, GPU, RAM. Booted up. Windows installed some drivers. Done. 

You do not need to reinstall windows or the sim if you are on Win10. Win10 should survive the changes and automatically PnP the new hardware.

Some years ago it was more tricky, but things improved.

 

I just completed an upgrade of MB, CPU, cooler & memory without uninstalling P3Dv4.5 and without reinstalling Win10. I think what helped is I first uninstalled all system related drivers, and I was going from an ASUS to another ASUS MB. On boot all drivers were reinstalled and everything was fine EXCEPT the license for Win10. Be sure to log into your MS account on your old system and make sure the license is saved there or at least ensure you have the current license activation code. The last thing you should do on your old system is uninstall Windows so it can be reactivated. I had to call MS to get mine reactivated since my Win10 was a free upgrade from Win8.

BTW, all the benchmark tests on my new system indicate no issue with any degraded performance at all.

Edited July 12, 20196 yr by bbuckley

20 hours ago, downscc said:

Windows picked up on the hardware change and all I had to do was re-authenticate my license I believe... based on memory.

It will only re-authenticate if you have bought a W10 license not if you've upgrade for free from W7 to W10.

17 hours ago, bbuckley said:

I just completed an upgrade of MB, CPU, cooler & memory without uninstalling P3Dv4.5 and without reinstalling Win10.

I need to correct this: I DID uninstall the P3Dv4.5 Client only and followed the LM instructions on de-activating the license so that it could be re-activated on the new build. I DID NOT uninstall Windows as it says in the text further down. I meant P3D and the windows drivers. And as I said, I did have to call MS to re-activate the WINDOWS 10 license, I think because it was a free upgrade from Win 8.

Also see the excellent advice in this post and replies:

 

3 hours ago, FPStewy said:

It will only re-authenticate if you have bought a W10 license not if you've upgrade for free from W7 to W10.

Interesting.  I did buy a W10 license because this was originally a new build.  LOL my old 4790K is still W7 and I never really want to go through updating that...

On 7/12/2019 at 12:05 PM, Speedbird 217 said:

With that kind of hardware change you will have to reinstall Windows, not just P3D.

I changed all my hardware and did NOT have to reinstall Windows 10. After a couple of boots it adapted itself. All I had to do is uninstall old drivers and the like. And believe me, it's working great.

It really depends. If you're just upgrading the mobo and CPU a reinstallation is not required. If you're upgrading the hard drive, then you'll need to reinstall P3D.
 

15 hours ago, arwasairl said:

It really depends. If you're just upgrading the mobo and CPU a reinstallation is not required. If you're upgrading the hard drive, then you'll need to reinstall P3D.
 

Great info, thanks.  I do not plan to upgrade the hard drive so that makes things a bit less cumbersome.  

If you have your OS on a seperate drive then it is a good chance to do a clean install of windows as others have said. I did this when upgrading CPU/MOBO/GPU/RAM. Then simply reinstalled windows on my OS drive, and after that plugged in my other ‘gaming’ drive with P3D and all of my other games