> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf > Of Seth Gordon > > Our Windows machine stopped working, and the guy at Micro Center was > nice enough to tell us "your motherboard's fried" without charging us > seventy bucks for the diagnostic. OK, I thought, I'll just go out and > get a new motherboard. How hard can that be? Bwah-hah-hah. > > The machine is an ASUS CM5571, and the motherboard is a P5QL-M-EPU. I > found the specs for the P5QL/EPU (no M) on newegg.com, but since that is > an ATX keyboard and my machine's motherboard is micro-ATX, I can't trust > that this accurately describes my machine. I can't find technical > documentation for the P5QL-M-EPU itself online, and judging from some of > the things I see in the Asus forums, I am not the only user who is > frustrated by this lack of documentation. My email to Asus tech support > on Saturday night has not yet received a response. > > The CPU is a Pentium E5400 / 2.7 GHz, the data bus is 800 MHz, and the > memory is DDR3-1333 SDRAM. Should I just look for any other micro-ATX > motherboard compatible with those chips? (The Asus P5G41C-M *looks* > like it fits the bill.) Will Windows give me grief once it boots up and > discovers that it's no longer running on the same motherboard as the OEM > supplied? What other frustrations do I have to look forward to?
All of the above are valid concerns and likely problems. If possible, you really want to replace the mobo with another one of the same make & model. If that's not possible... Then do as you're doing and just get all the hardware specs as close as possible. When it comes to booting windows again... There's a high probability that it will survive relatively smoothly. But it's certainly not guaranteed. It's possible that it'll either lack a driver that's necessary to boot (which is game over; reinstall windows) or it could possibly do as you've guessed, and decide it's no longer a valid copy of windows. Fortunately, in the latter case, you probably won't have too much trouble fixing it. You reactivate, it fails, it makes you call up, you explain to some person that you just replaced a fried motherboard, you didn't clone or move the windows license, etc... I've never failed to reactivate windows in that situation, so I think you'll probably be fine. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
