I've made my mark

One question that sometimes gets asked is, “How easy is it to upgrade a computer?” The answer is that it’s often quite simple (for someone who knows how to take apart a computer and replace parts). For others, just let your techie friends do the work.

Upgrading a computer can be a matter of less than an hour, including testing. This includes installing a new hard drive, adding more memory, etc. There are times, though, when upgrading a computer is not a simple task. One of the complications in upgrading a computer arises when your try to upgrade your CPU or motherboard, or both. It’s because Windows doesn’t like it when the core system hardware is changed. It might not even work at all.

But there’s a way around having to reinstalling Windows.

Recently I’ve upgraded (finally) my desktop computer from an Athlon XP Palomino machine to a Pentium 4 Northwood B. And that’s from parts taken from other the computers someone else didn’t want any more because they have upgraded to the latest tech. But anyway, here’s the details:

My computer was running Vista Business x86, previously on an Intel D845GERG2, with CPU Intel Celeron Northwood 2.6GHz. I wanted to up(down?)grade it to motherboard AsRock K7S41GX with CPU AMD Athlon XP Palomino 1800+. I knew that (from experience) had I simply replaced the motherboard and CPU, the system would not even be able to start up.

This is because Windows tries to load chipset-specific drivers for the system, and therefore would die a horrible death if it tries to load the incorrect drivers.

So in order to make Windows survive the climate change, I first have to “generalize” it. By doing so, I place the computer in a state where it will identify and install any new hardware when it next starts up. It works just like when Windows is first installed when it needs to find out what hardware it is running on.

SysPrep

To generalise the computer, I use a tool called “SysPrep”, or “System Preparation Tool”. Although Windows can adapt to hardware changes, it still needs to be re-activated.

To do so I first start a command prompt in Adminstrator mode. Find “Command Prompt” in the start menu, and then right click on it then select “Run as Administrator”. For Windows XP Users, the commands are similar, but different anyway. In the command prompt, type:

%SystemDrive%

cd %SystemRoot%\system32\sysprep

sysprep

A window should now appear on screen, which presents you with the available options. For the system cleanup action, select “Enter system audit mode” (unless you want to set up the system when you next start up), and check the “Generalize” Box. This will prepare the system for hardware independence. Alternatively run sysprep with several command line arguments:

sysprep /generalize /audit /shutdown

Also, select “Shutdown” in Shutdown Options, because we want to power off the machine to swap out the motherboard. Go ahead and click OK. After a while, the system will shut down and is then ready for anything that comes up.

Now would be a good time to swap the hardware, and then fire up the computer again.

Windows will then start up as though it’s being started for the first time. Everything else should work as expected. Remember to re-assess the system’s score to see how much faster it got!

Is it possible to do it without SysPrep?

Well I didn’t think so, not until I actually managed to do it. So from the AsRock K7S41GX and AMD Athlon XP Palomino, I recently upgraded my computer to a Pentium 4 Northwood 2.4 B on motherboard AsRock P4S61. The reason why I had to upgrade my motherboard without using Sysprep was because it just didn’t work. Clicking OK on the Sysprep dialog box simply told me that an unknown error has occurred. So I was out of options. If it doens’t work, I would just either repair my windows installation, or reinstall it.

I didn’t think that it would work without reinstalling Windows was because I was changing between two different hardware architectures. The way the system components talk to each other in an AMD CPU is drastically different to how an Intel CPU would. But why was I able to do it?

The chipset on the Athlon system was a SiS 741GX, while the chipset on the P4 system was SiS 661FX. My best guess for why it worked was that since the chipsets are the same, the way it interfaces with Windows must be somehow similar to each other (abstrating the underlying differences) and hence didn’t cause a catastrophic failure when Windows tried to initialise the system and disk drivers on startup. I guess it might also help for the two motherboards to be from the same manufacturer (AsRock).

So the general idea would be, you can be lazy and not generalise the system before upgrading, and try your luck. If that fails, then undo your upgrade, go back to the old system and generalise it.

(Images borrowed from their respective manufacturer websites)

Tags: computer, CPU, motherboard, upgrade, Windows