all HD contents from 1 comp to another?

My son's comp has an ASUS P4S800 MB, mine is a P4P800 SE ASUS. I'm haveing a bit of a problem with my board, he's comp runs great. Was going to put same MB he has in my comp. Then copy his drive on to my drive. Below would be the differences between our systems.

Would have:
Same board, agp card, cd drive, on-board LAN

Mine:
Standard 2 button mouse
HP 9100 burner
Belkin CF reader
SoundBLaster Live 5.1 vid card
Scanner
HP 5550 printer
P4 2.4 533 CPU
2 @ DDR 2700 256 MB ram

Son's "
Scroll button mouse
Sound Blaster Live (standard) card i think
HP Apollo P1200 printer
P4 2.0 400 CPU
2 @ DDR 2100 256 MB ram

Both have Win 98SE

Now besides the programs, bookmarks, email, and such, that would be easy to tiddy up.

Question! Has anyone done this, could it work, would this be a better fix for my comp problems since his works perfect! My comp has IRQ conflicts, minor lock ups, games exit all of a sudden, game sound and or video studders/fails.

 

I haven't done it but see no reason why it wouldn't work assuming your machine has the cpu and memory to handle the new mb, and it certainly looks as if it does. However, you ask if this will do it better, and the question is "better than what?" Solving your other problems by addressing them rather than replacing the mb? I don't know, but copying the hard drive can be done without changing the mb. "Better" would depend on whether you want to upgrade your mb and deal with the attendant expense and all the time involved.

 

Well as far as expence, I bought my current board last month, along with the cpu and ram. I'd also be downgrading my current board this way. A few weeks before I upgraded wife's comp and son's to P4's. All from PII's. Trouble, wont be much for me, I've done this (building) before. I guess I'm looking for comments to add to my reasoning for doing this. What I plan to do is copy son's HD with WD's hard drive sofware, to my drive. Then with mine in his comp, uninstall some minor software he has on it. If it don't work, Im really not at a loss except the MB which I can put into another comp if need be or sell it.

Thanks for your view

 

Downgrade??

Even if you change motherboards there may still be basic incompatabilities with the hardware you are currently using (eg. fighting for the same resources). Resource conflicts are generally caused by greedy "added" hardware, I doubt you would find any with a "basic" setup (the motherboard conflicting with itself??) You may find the same problems come back when you change motherboards and install the drivers for your periferals. Badly installed drivers can cause some of the symptoms you describe.

Me, I would disconnect/remove all the added hardware. Boot to Safe Mode. Remove everything in Device Manager. Boot to the Win98 disk and reinstall over C:\Windows. After that install the latest drivers from Asus, then the video drivers, then upgrade DirectX...then take it for a test drive.

OR

Remove the hardware. Format the drive, install Windows and the drivers as above.

Nothing to lose.

I agree with pstanhopes views. Why not try to find out why it is acting this way.

Matt

 

update..

Made a full copy of son's hard drive using WD Data Life Guard. Hooked my drive to his machine, uninstalled stuff I didnt want. Then put it into my comp, with new same MB.

After a few minor bugs, I got everything working fine so far. Will do more tests this weekend.

 

<<Then put it into my comp, with new same MB.>>

Do you mean the same MB as your son's?...Congratulations, well done.