I'm looking to purchase a barebones system, motherboard, CPU, power supply and case only and my question is, will I have any troubles just dropping my old hard drives, RAM, CD/DVD drives, firewire cards etc. into the new machine? I'm looking to upgrade from a P4 1.3 Ghz to a 3.0 Ghz and I'll be using XP, which is currently installed on my computer. Is this as easy as it seems or does anyone expect any problems?

i believe XP looks for system changes and may not function nearly as well, if at all.

The manual insallation of all your components and drives shouldnt be very hard. But you would be wise to re-install Windows. Just make sure that your old components will fit on your new system (ie: if you have DDRAM or SDRAM, check what the newer one supports, i don't recall which one is the most up to date).

This sounds like it could be more of a hassle than it's worth..... I'm hoping that I wouldn't have to reformat my c: cause I've got a lot of stuff on there that I would like to keep. If I moved the c: into a new machine could I just do a windows XP re-install from the disk without losing the rest of my information?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... =7&Go.y=26

some of these asus barebones are pretty good!

I've been reading up on this lately cause I might build my own system very soon.

More than likely your hard drive will be ok, but it is safe to do some sort of backup. As far as adding all of your components, you just have to make sure all of your old ones will be compatible with the new motherboard. Is your HD ATA or SATA? Do you have a AGP video card and audio, or are the integrated into the motherboard.

And while your upgrading you might want to think about going on to an AMD 64, since it's going to become more standard in the near future. But that's your own personal decision.

Just read up, there's plenty of info out there. You can find really good deals on barebones systems. Just make sure you get one that fits all of your criteria.