Foxconn AMD 740G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

Newegg ASUS M4A785TD-M ATX AMD Motherboard $70 Discuss (1)

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Newegg MSI X58M Micro ATX Intel Motherboard $140 Discuss (1)

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Looks like Foxconn gives the rebate every month. For those people bought this board in last promotion period, you should use the rebate form promotion period of 11/6 -12/5, if you happened to use this one (12/6/-1/5/09), you would be certainly denied. A friend of mine falled into this trap and got screwed. Remember, there is no re-submission for Foxconn.

Otherwise, a good cheap/basic board for a low end system (if you intended to use on board video though).

Question - I have an old Compaq desktop (Celeron) with XP. Can I swap out the guts to this motherboard w/ an AMD Phenom but keep the hardrive? Would the hard drive and its current XP intall run if the processor and board was swapped out? I don't have original XP disks, just the crappy compaq reinstall disks. Thanks.

#2 If that's the case - I will suggest you use the same Chipset M/B as your compaq one. Compaq use a lot of boards from Abit or Gigabyte so you might take a look of your board 1st and compared if you can fins a similar board. I used to have a Abit M/B they use for compaq. Thay are exactly the same but BIOS- I can even flash the BIOS back and forth between Abit and compaq BIOS.
The restore CD suppose to check the Compaq BIOS before installation, so if you swap your M/B out- you might not be able to restore your XP system. For your information.

These things are dropping fast in price!!

#2, a fresh install would be best. Major component swaps trigger the XP product code requirement. I've borrowed XP CDs and used the product code on the computer case to do re-installs. A new motherboard also means a new network driver, sound driver, video driver, PCI-e bus, etc. You would have to get drivers for the new motherboard added to your present computer before swapping the drive. Maybe switching all of your drivers to generic ones on your present computer would help if you insist on keeping the hard drive as it is. Still, a fresh install would be best.

thx #1.

#2 you can transition a current XP install to a completely different board. Most of the devices will find their drivers, or you can download the ones you need on the net.

However, you MUST change the following two devices BEFORE removing the HD from the current system:
Uninstall the graphics driver (Nvidia, ATI, Intel, etc..) and force the graphics card/chip to use the generic PCI VGA driver.
Uninstall any add-on IDE storage driver and force it to use the generic PCI IDE controller driver.
If there are any other weird chipset-specific drivers/applications (things that appear in Add/Remove programs), remove those too.

I've used this method for years and have been able to transition XP installs from one machine to another, even completely different chipsets.

Thanks #3 and #5.

#6 summed it up nicely

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