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> 1. Automatic device discovery and driver installation Fun story. Had Windows 7 installed on an old HDD. Decided to build myself a new PC, so I got all the pa

• Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  Yeah, Windows got a lot better at handling motherboard swaps. I remember trying to do a PC overhaul with Windows 2000. I swapped out the motherboard, RAM, and CPU, and Windows would fail to boot, crashing with an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error. IIRC, I managed to recover without wiping the drive and doing a clean install by putting back in the old mobo/RAM/CPU, booting up, and swapping the IDE driver from a motherboard-specific driver to a generic IDE driver (Which comes at a signifcant performance penalty because I lost UDMA support), then swapping back to the new mobo. It booted fine after that, and I was able to install the proper motherboard drivers to get UDMA support on my IDE drive.
  • theandrewbailey 6y ago
    Back in the day, I had a drive of Windows 98 that had been through two or three very different motherboards. It was a good day if it bluescreened only once, because it usually did more often.
• datavirtue 6y ago
  Yep, and you could clone it with xcopy.
• zyemuzu 6y ago
  It's a wonderful feature - I've now been through 3 full system swaps with the same OS. The only exception is software that ties it's license to a kind of hardware identifier. Even then it's a very minor inconvenience compared with the Win 98/XP years. I have a few teenage memories of pulling all nighters just to reinstall my OS and programs.