Alfaj0r.com

A couple of months ago, I got myself a new computer. I ordered all the parts from NewEgg, and put it together myself. If you’re not interested on the size of my e-peen, move on down a couple of paragraphs. The parts of the new rig are as follows:

• Intel e8400 Core 2 Duo Processor.
• Gigabyte P35-DS3L motherboard.
• 2x G.Skill 1Gb PC2-6400 RAM.
• EVGA nVidia 9600GT Video card.
• All in a fancy and very slick Antec P182 case.

After a couple of months of not having used my old PC, and not having any use for it at all, I decided to hand it down to my AFS family. (These are the people that hosted me while I was an exchange student, for those of you who are just tuning in).
Well, here’s where the dilemma started. They already had a Windows PC, and it would have been a hassle to re-install every single program, and to re-create the accounts, permissions, and transfer all the logins, passwords and documents. What to do, what to do!
I couldn’t just slap their computer’s Hard Drive into my old PC, because Windows ties to the hardware in some black magic kind of way, and it would have thrown a fit if I’d done that. No, can’t do that… or can I?
Turns out, you can!
Once again, the benefits of ponying up $10 for SomethingAwful pay off, and I find this great article at one of the many goon projects: http://shsc.info/MovingWindowsToNewHardware.
Just what I needed! So I set off to sysprep the old system, and after that was done, I installed the HDD into the new one.
I booted it up, and… shit, wait. Wtf, blue screen? And then it reboots, without even letting me see what’s going on? Damn it, what do I do now!
I put the HDD back in to the old system, let it boot… At least it still works, and I haven’t entirely blown the Windows install.
I read the article again… and it says that if that happens, you can just do a windows install in repair mode, and you’ll be golden, so I take the HDD out again, and put it in the new one.
Great, I forgot to sysprep it. It goes back to the old hardware, I sysprep it, and once again it comes into the new hardware.
I run the repair install, and after the usual 20 or so minutes, it’s done.
Awesome, everything worked! The last thing that it needs now is to find the drivers for the new hardware, and it’s good to go.
It took me about one hour to find drivers for the motherboard, and I ended up just installing generic nVidia nforce3 drivers, which seem to work just fine.

I found it to be pretty cool that I could do this, and I didn’t have to re-install a whole lot of applications and re-do a lot of work that had already been done. I scored some major points with the fams, and now the kids can play some games from the 21st century (they were using a PIII at 700Mhz with 512MBs of RAM ). This is the feel-good post of the month.