I am planning on upgrading my P III 450 to a Athlon XP 1800 with new motherboard and DDR RAM and 400 W power supply. I don't have any problems with the installation except for how to deal with the existing OS and programs on the hard drive. Do I have to delete everything from the hard drive and re-format? If so how do I do that? Or can I just install everything and turn on the computer?Any help would be greatly appreciated.Andy

When ever you do a major upgrade like this it is best to do a low level format on your hard drive to avoid unseen hardware conflict.Basically you just want to do a fdisk and then format.Remember once you install that new motherboard and get windows back on to get directly to www.viahardware.com and get the lastest 4 n 1 drivers .Install the agp in turbo mode and once you Richard Dillon KATLSr First Officer www.jetstarairlines.com"Bill Grabowski's"ERJ-145 panel Beta TeamMD-11 panel Beta Team____________________________"Lets Roll" 9/11 Specs AMD 1600 XP 512MB DDR GF3 ti 200 64MB SBliveCh Products Yoke and Pedals(usb)Windows 2000 SP2

Nope you don't have to delete anything. The OS should detect and install any new hardware.However, if you haven't done a complete reformat in a long time (a year or so) and you aren't using any registry or general harddrive cleaning software than this would be a good time to do so. I dunno what OS you are using so I can't give any specific instructions. Anyway, the OS should have a manual containing instructions for a clean installation once you've reformatted.You should of course backup any relevant data you might have (such as your FS2K2 add-ons and CFG files.)-Leon Medado

If you are ever changing the motherboard (or processor type) then you are normally better doing a complete reinstall, since there is so much "rubbish" left behind in the system setup that your PC is likely to get slow (at best) or very buggy or even die completely.It is also possible to install over the top of the original system (which keeps your data intact - although most applications would have to be reinstalled) - however, that should really only be used as a last resort if your OS dies completely.If you have 2 hard disks and are so inclined then you can always move all of your data across to that and use it as a 2nd drive, else you are best backing everything up to whatever you can (CD / ZIP Drive / Network I guess !!!).

My 5 cents. I am currently building a new AMD XP2100 with a Winfast Leadtech GeForce 4 Ti4400 and 512megs of DDR2700. I will put in a new Western Digital 60gig HD and put in my favorite OS either Win ME or XP. I will then pull the HD out of my old P4 1.5 mhz box and then copy over the appropriate folders FS2002 and all its addons. The same with the rest of the games. I have done this in the past and it works well. A freshly loaded OS just runs great. It seems that after two years of constant use any OS slows down and just is not as fast!Best of luck and let us know how it goes!!!RegardsTony