cjrgreen: That is a 25-digit number (well, letters and numbers)? That is the product key, NOT the activation key. The activation key is a 50-digit number. It is never printed anywhere. Even if you had the old activation key, it would be no good with your new hardware.

A given product key and activation key are good on ONE set of hardware. Not a DIFFERENT set of hardware. If you change the motherboard, you have a different set of hardware.

If Windows complains, you call Microsoft tech support and get a new activation key that is good on your new hardware. That's all there is to it. You can't make it simpler.

(You may have to update Windows XP to Service Pack 3 before they will help you. Windows XP before Service Pack 3 is no longer supported.)

sloganvirst: Ok.

As said, I will have to wait for the MB to arrive, then see what problems I have.

sloganvirst: Trouble is, the SATA one still has some of my stuff on it from before the rig broke, and I would like to retrieve it before re-formatting it.

olnorton: Well if that drive is the one with XP on it & your previous motherboard wasn't an nForce4 chipset, then you will have to boot into safe mode & uninstal all your old motherboard drivers.
I would still do a clean install after backing up your data, especially if your old CPU was a single core & the new one a dual core. Windows only changes the Hardware Abstraction Layer on a clean instal.

cjrgreen: See, that key is tied to the original hardware. It has already been activated with that hardware. It's not automatically usable with different hardware. Windows knows what hardware it is running on and checks whether the key was activated with this hardware.

So, you try to come up on new hardware. Windows sees that the hardware has changed and says, in effect, "no, this isn't the computer I was installed on." It tells you to activate again. You try to activate automatically online. Microsoft's server sees your product key and says "I've seen you before. You activated on a different computer. I won't activate you again."

It tells you to go to Microsoft for a new activation key. You need both the product key and the activation key. Since you couldn't get the activation key automatically, you have to talk to a tech support rep to get one.

You call Microsoft, tell the tech support rep that you had to replace the motherboard. The tech support rep gives you a hard time about it, then gives you a new activation key.

You type the activation key into the Windows dialog that wants it. And everybody's happy. That's all there is to it.

sloganvirst: How do you boot into safe mode? I know it is probably obvious, but I don't know...

Arkose: Power on the system and hit F8 until a menu appears. Some motherboards will beep when you hit the key too early but that doesn't matter. Once you reach the menu choose Safe Mode (if you see the normal Windows loading screen instead of a menu you haven't hit it soon enough and will have to try again). Eventually you'll reach a mostly normal Windows desktop. From there you can get into Device Manager.

Once you've uninstalled the motherboard drivers simply restart and let Windows start normally and it should install the necessary drivers automatically or prompt you for their location.

olnorton: Well if that drive is the one with XP on it & your previous motherboard wasn't an nForce4 chipset, then you will have to boot into safe mode & uninstal all your old motherboard drivers.
I would still do a clean install after backing up your data, especially if your old CPU was a single core & the new one a dual core. Windows only changes the Hardware Abstraction Layer on a clean instal.

cjrgreen: If you have peripherals that are old enough to be made for a PPC Mac or a SPARCstation, they are so obsolete that you will pretty much have to figure on replacing them :(

The only UEFI-only peripherals at this point are disk drives bigger than 2TB. (They cannot use the old MBR structure, which BIOS requires. Only UEFI can address them properly.)

I don't know of any peripherals that are outright incompatible with UEFI; the most likely exceptions are very old ones.

I have one setup with UEFI. It is not locked down to Secure UEFI. So far it has run everything I have thrown at it, including Windows XP and several Linuxen. I haven't tried any old hardware on it except for some old Intel NICs, and it had no problem with those.

sloganvirst: Alright,

I am getting a new motherboard and CPU for my gaming rig, but the one I am interested in has 2 PCI-E ports.

Now, I have a GeForce 9400 GT and a Quadro 4000 that is non SLI.

My question is, if I put them both in, will it work? I.E, for the OpenGL games, will my PC use the Quadro, and for DirectX ones, will it use the GeForce?

Thanks,

sloganvirst

EDIT: The motherboard is a ASUS A8N-SLI, if it helps.

Snickersnack: I was thinking more in terms of whether or not an expansion board with PC BIOS expansion firmware (like a GPU) will run in a machine with UEFI firmware. The old Macs and Suns were just an example. IIRC, back in the day, you could get a PCI Radeon 7500 for PC, PPC Mac, Sparc workstations but you needed different firmware for all three.

Intel Macs use a variety of EFI for their firmware. I don't think you can use a PC GPU (one intended for use with PCs with PC BIOS firmware) without flashing them. My concern is whether or not UEFI PCs will have that problem. They may very well not. There's a wierd little embedded PPC board called the Efika that uses an x86+BIOS emulator to use PC graphics cards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efika

Your experience makes it sound like there is a compatability layer of some sort. Hopefully that's a standard feature.

Interesting times we live in. Without BIOS firmware, PCs won't be IBM PC compatibles/ PC clones anymore. ;)

mojoman69: You won't be able to use both cards for gaming. The primary card in PCI-E slot 1 will be the gaming card. You might be able to have one of them as a physx card. But you won't be able to use the 2 cards in tandom.

sloganvirst: What is a physx card?

sloganvirst: What is a physx card?

cjrgreen: A PhysX card is a card that runs PhysX :)

Seriously, nVidia has a proprietary physics engine called PhysX. It does things like calculate trajectories of severed body parts :) This lets games use physics-based animation, which can be far more realistic and varied than precomputed animation. You can dedicate a graphics card to running PhysX, for playing games that use it heavily.

You need at least an 8600 GT or 9500 GT to use it for a PhysX card, though.