Laptop problem

[lsmk2002]

Friends,

I've been going thru this forum and finding it very useful. This is my first posting. I would appreciate your suggestion/help on my problem. Please bear with me if it is too trivial.

Here is my issue:-

My laptop motherboard is gone bad and it is not economical to repair it. So I bought a same model another working laptop at good price from ebay. I would like to swap the hard-disk and the RAM to the newer(working) one.
Will there be any issues if I just swap the hard-disks and RAM? My original one is running win-2k and the working one is running Win-ME. Any likely BIOs or some other issues? I request some advises before proceeding with disk and RAM swapping.

[Xeroid]

If it is the exact same model then it should work fine. We do it all the time. If one of our laptops at work go down, the tech specialist brings us another laptop and we just swap the HD from the broken one because it has all our diagnostic software on it.

The memory should work also.

[RedFury]

If it doesn't have the same motherboard, remove everything from the Device manager ( all devices ) before you shut the laptop down for the last time ( if you can ) so that the new laptop hardware will get detected the next time windows boots from the swapped HDD.

RegCleaner is an excellent program for doing this. It has a tool to "reset hardware configuration" which removes all devices in one click.

BTW, Welcome to TechIMO!

[rpertusio]

Welcome to TechIMO!

I would try to make sure the new laptop has an equal or newer version of the BIOS that is in your broken laptop. (If you are unsure, I would recommend updating the BIOS on your new laptop to the most current.)

Otherwise, there should be no difficulties in exchanging the HD and RAM (assuming they really are the same model of laptop.)

- rp

[Xeroid]

Yep, RegCleaner is a program and you can download it for free.

[lsmk2002]

Thanks for your reply. Connecting too many USB hardwares to my laptop like webcam, CD-RWs, USB2 PCMCIA cards,802.11b wireless cards, port-replicatiors, external speakers and mic , will they pose any problem to motherboard or to other components?

Just want to know as a precaution.