dnavarrojr
New Member
At work I've been running Vista 64 for awhile and I had my birthday this week, so I talked the wife into letting me upgrade my computer. So I got a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and video card (went over budget and bought a new HD too, but SSHH, don't say anything).
Since I'm reusing my case and I wanted to minimize downtime from re-installing everything all over again on the new system and I couldn't run both at the same time, I first upgraded the video card in the old system and made sure everything worked fine. (BTW, I have a 1TB external USB drive for backup, so I did a FULL backup before I got started.) Then, I swapped in the new motherboard, CPU and RAM.
Normally, I would not recommend trying this because getting XP up and running after a swap to a different motherboard doesn't always work and requires a lot of patience and know-how if you run into driver issues and such. In my case, I bought my new MB from the same MFG as the old one and knew that most of the MB drivers were at least compatible with the new board, if out of date.
Once I got all the new hardware working with XP, I did a new backup and tested all of my required applications. I then used VMWare to create a virtual machine from the XP partition on my hard drive by restoring my working backup to a new Virtual Machine, then fixing the driver issues so that everything ran perfectly inside of VMWare. I copied the VM to my USB drive and tested it with the VMWare Player on the wife's computer and everything worked fine.
I then removed the old hard drive, put in the new one and installed Vista 64-bit from scratch. Got it updated, installed Avast AV and then burned an image to DVD and as an ISO on my USB drive. Installed VMWare in Vista and copied my VM to the new hard drive. Tested it and all my apps are running perfectly in VMware, so I can continue working.
Now I can take my time re-installing all of my apps in Vista and getting things the way I want. I'm gonna wait until next weekend to format the old drive and put it back in the system as a scratch drive.
Since I'm reusing my case and I wanted to minimize downtime from re-installing everything all over again on the new system and I couldn't run both at the same time, I first upgraded the video card in the old system and made sure everything worked fine. (BTW, I have a 1TB external USB drive for backup, so I did a FULL backup before I got started.) Then, I swapped in the new motherboard, CPU and RAM.
Normally, I would not recommend trying this because getting XP up and running after a swap to a different motherboard doesn't always work and requires a lot of patience and know-how if you run into driver issues and such. In my case, I bought my new MB from the same MFG as the old one and knew that most of the MB drivers were at least compatible with the new board, if out of date.
Once I got all the new hardware working with XP, I did a new backup and tested all of my required applications. I then used VMWare to create a virtual machine from the XP partition on my hard drive by restoring my working backup to a new Virtual Machine, then fixing the driver issues so that everything ran perfectly inside of VMWare. I copied the VM to my USB drive and tested it with the VMWare Player on the wife's computer and everything worked fine.
I then removed the old hard drive, put in the new one and installed Vista 64-bit from scratch. Got it updated, installed Avast AV and then burned an image to DVD and as an ISO on my USB drive. Installed VMWare in Vista and copied my VM to the new hard drive. Tested it and all my apps are running perfectly in VMware, so I can continue working.
Now I can take my time re-installing all of my apps in Vista and getting things the way I want. I'm gonna wait until next weekend to format the old drive and put it back in the system as a scratch drive.