This is more of a tip than a guide, but as a new visitor to this subject of computer hardware upgrades specific to motherboards with some computer experience in other matters, this is perhaps the most important point to consider. The true techno-geeks will not even mention it!

If you have an older computer that you like well enough, and you decide to upgrade the motherboard to give it a new lease on life, consider that you can't simply restart the computer with your upgraded hardware.

1. You will probably have to uninstall all optional hardware, espcially disk controllers and some software add-ons before doing the upgrade. Why?
2. Because you are going to have to reinstall the operating system and reconfigure the computer, and it needs to start from a standard system configuration. Why?
3. Because the motherboard is such a major part of the machine's personality that the operating system must know about all the details of the motherboard in order to run. It simply won't know how to start up with the new hardware in place.

The various online tips about upgrading motherboards tend to assume you already know about this major hurdle. The software running on a PC is more important than the computer, so your upgrade may be more expensive than you realize, and simply copying your old data to a new machine becomes more attractive. If you DO decide to do this upgrade and want to keep your workstation's desktop as close to the "before" state as possible, you also will want to know the procedure to transfer a hard drive from one computer to another. There are several online sources of good information such as the forums at http://pcmech.com.

Caveat Upgrador!