I have a few questions

[XXlinkXX]

I have an HP Pavilion a450n Desktop PC which comes with the unknown P4SD-LA motherboard.

I am willing to invest in a new motherboard but i want to be clear about some things.

Will my Hard Drive work with my new motherboard? Will it work without having to reformat it? (I still want to keep my files and Windows XP on the hard drive)

My Video Card has DDR Video memory, does it work with all motherboards or the AGP has to be DDR also? (This one really confuses me because i can only find motherboards with DDR RAM but i dont know if it will work with the Video Card)

Also, if and when i install a new motherboard will it automatically configure my CD and Floppy drives or do i have to manually configure them myself in the BIOS?

Thanks for your time

[Darthtanion]

Re: I have a few questions

1- Your new motherboard will work with any industry standard hard drive. I can't say for sure whether HP uses this type of component or not, but I believe they do. They just screw around with things like PSU connections and such as well as making some sizing restrictions. It is likely you would need a new PSU and possible to require a new case for your upgrade. As to the reformat issue, you should ALWAYS perform a fresh install of Windows when you change out motherboards, especially if it has a different chipset than the original.

2- If your video board is an AGP standard, then it will work in any AGP motherboard that supports its voltage and rating. For example, older AGP 1x boards require 3.3v to the AGP bus while newer 8x models only require 1.5 or 0.8v to that same bus. Make sure your video board and motherboard have comparable slots so everything works as it should.

3- Configuring optical drives depends on the operating system. If you're running WinXP then it should all be done automatically behind the scenes. Even Win9x did a fair job of this. Modern motherboards will generally recognize any opticaldrives by default so you'll just need to make sure that the boot sequence is set up to your liking.