The [FGS] Clan

I have an old motherboard (about 4 years old) In my computer with a pentium 4 CPU. This motherboard seems ancient because it has no PCIE ports and only supports pentium 4 and celeron D prosessors, and up to 2 GB of RAM. I have this board upgraded as far as I can go because of it's limitations. My Dad has a newer motherboard just sitting there not being used with a PCIE ATI graphics card (newer than the one I have) and a pentium D processor. I want to put this in my computer but I have so many programs and things that I would not be able to get again because of the legality of them. Is there a way to just switch these out without having to reformat my computer?

You don't have to re-format if you are switching motherboards. Just make sure your PSU is powerful enough for powering the mobo + videocard and that it has the correct wires for powering the videocard too.

After connecting everything with the PSU and motherboard, go to your BIOS and set it so that it'll boot the OS from the hard drive where it's already been installed.

Can you post links to your motherboards and the videocard?

Make sure everything is compatible with eachother too.

Check this power calc to make sure your PSU will make it.

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

From my experience, operating systems like windows tend to make trouble if you change such basic hardware parts like main boards.

Putting a hard drive with installed windows into another computer and booting it, sometimes causes the system to end in blue screens, for instance.

Putting a hard drive with installed windows into another computer and booting it, sometimes causes the system to end in blue screens, for instance. Confused

yes, but if you just want to transfer data, put the jumper into slave position, plug the HDD into another (S)ATA cable and set the boot in bios. Make sure that the second disk (the one you want to transfer FROM) will not be the first one to boot.

The best idea is using a linux livecd or an external usb/firewire disk enclosure
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_enclosure )

Make a HDD backup xD