Motherboards are undoubtedly the most difficult component to upgrade. In the rush to ensure CPU, RAM, and front-side bus compatibility, many users forget the most difficult part of the job: the Windows part. Anyone who's booted up a Windows box for the first time after a motherboard swap knows the pain and tedium it entails -- a long and arduous procession of cheery "Add New Hardware" dialogs for hardware that rarely gets added, a steady stream of blue screens from baffled VXD or WDM drivers, and a My Computer that seems to be content to show just your C drive, nothing else. Even though most of your add-in cards remain the same, the new motherboard is bound to assign them slightly different resources (IRQ's, DMA's, etc.) which will confuse Windows and trick it into detecting a bazillion different devices you already had. A clean wipe of the hard drive and full OS installation with fresh drivers and patches is undoubtedly the best solution. In fact, most competent IT professionals recommend such a procedure at least once a year regardless of upgrades, simply because of the malformed stubs that accumulate in the Windows Registry and the annoying TSR programs that pile up from unintended downloads. But there are times when a complete wipe is not feasible, due to large amounts of sensitive data or lack of original program CD's. In these cases we're made hostage to Windows' sometimes uncooperative plug and play code. The holy grail of preparing Windows for a motherboard swap is to expunge any and all information about the PC's current hardware. That means uninstalling drivers, pruning registry entries, unloading VXD's, deleting INF's, and stopping TSR's. You want as close to a clean slate as possible the first time Windows boots and detects the new hardware. It's a big, messy job, and in my experience, it's rarely done without a hitch. Here are some steps you can take to minimize the madness: Abstractly, the procedure is: