Replacing Gigabyte G41M ES2L With Gigabyte G41M Combo - Will I have to reboot XP

[jamie300993]

Hi, My PC has a gigabyte G41M ES2L motherboard, Pentium D915 Processor and 4GB DDR2 800 Ram. The computer however just died one day and I have come to the conclusion that it is the motherboard as I have tried the processor, RAM and PSU in another machine and all worked fine. The computer simply is dead and does nothing when the power button is pressed. My question is; Can i replace the ES2L board with the Combo board without needing to reinstall XP as I have used up all the allocated installs on our DIsk and therefore cannot install again? Both boards have an ICH7 Southbridge, although the combo has intel GMA X4500, whereas the ES2L has GMA X3000 I believe. This shouldnt be a problem as I will be using the same PCI-Express Nvidia Graphics card. I also noticed that the boards have different LAN chips, one being realtek and one being Atheros, will this be a problem? For floppy disk storage, the es2l has ite IF8718 chip, whereas the combo has ite IF8718F chip. Will this difference be a problem as I dont use a floppy drive anyway? Help would be appriciated as this is my second PC aside my laptop and I would like to get it running using the minimal amount of money if possible? Thanks

 

[ATMINSIDE]

Yes, you should reinstall XP.

 

[jamie300993]

Thanks for reply. Would a pentium D 915 (2.8GHz, dual core), 4GB DDR2 800 RAM and Geforce GT240 Graphics card be able to run windows 7 ok for basic tasks such as word processing etc? Im considering upgrading this machine to 7 as I believe that windows Xp support is being dropped soon? Is this correct?

 

[ATMINSIDE]

Yes, it would run 7 just fine.

It is correct that XP support is being dropped.

 

[Mario1]

I don't see why a re-install is necessary. Changing the LAN drivers n whatnot should make the PC work just fine.
I fully support installing Windows 7 though.