The replacement Dell motherboard arrived today. With some doubt and trepidation I swapped out the old one and installed the new one, moving the CPU from the old to the new. I installed the memory, then plugged in the front panel connector and all of the power connectors. After switching it on, the fan no longer went into hyperdrive -- it spun up, and then slowed down to where it is supposed to be.
With basic operation verified, I plugged in all the drives and internal cards, closed up the case, plugged all the external cables back in, and then powered up. I first had to adjust the BIOS settings to my configuration and then restarted. Boom! The dreaded Windows Blue Screen.
Fortunately, from past experience swapping out motherboards under Windows XP, I suspected that a Repair Install from the original CD would reset whatever hardware configuration information had caused the blue screen to occur. Did I have the CD handy? The answer was yes, and went about the repair process. (BTW, many of the stock PC setups at computer retailers no longer include this crucial Operating System reinstall CD. A custom built one from a local PC store will include one.)
The repair install takes about 45 minutes to complete. During the process, there were numerous errors regarding .NET Framework 2.0 DLLs. I figured I could reinstall the .NET Framework later (a correct guess, I discovered). After it completed, the PC restarted as it was supposed to, but it was back to the original OS files, meaning all of the updates for it had to be redownloaded and installed (which is still happening as I write this, some 2 hours later).
As I was starting out that process I discovered another issue -- Windows Installer 3.1 is required for the new updates, but that wouldn't install because of files-in-use issues after the Repair Install. After a little Live search, I discovered a page that explained how to correct this problem. I followed all the instructions and Windows Installer did get installed, but somehow the DLLs in the Windows\System32 directory didn't get added... Another problem...
Whatever the case, I ended up doing some other things, including restoring the old DLL files. But the updater didn't like that, so I renamed the files again and reinstalled Windows Installer 3.1. This time the new files appeared. I really don't know what happened or why.
With that accomlished it was now a matter of reinstalling .NET Framework 2.0, Internet Explorer 7.0, and all the other OS updates -- which I think is mostly done now.
I still don't know if all of my other applications will work or not. They typically do after a Repair Install, but occasionally there are apps that have problems and might need a repiar or reinstall.
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