Monday 4 October 2010

Intel DX38BT to DP55KG Caveat – Activate Again

Our main office system decided to die this morning. It has been behaving a little on the strange side with network related communications becoming somewhat spotty. The Outlook connection seemed to receive the quickest impact from whatever was going flaky.

We had ordered in an Intel DP55KG, Intel i7-875K, and a CoolerMaster v8 CPU cooler early last month for the purpose of swapping out the system’s DX38BT, QX9650 C2 Extreme, and Zalman CPU cooler. There never seemed to be enough time to do the swap.

Well, this morning’s death made the swap a necessity.

The component swap went painlessly. After running the Intel PROSet driver update, a chipset update, and a few “New Hardware Found” dialogues and reboots the system came up flawlessly. The dual 80GB X25-M SSDs in a RAID 0 stripe were picked up by the newer version on board software RAID without an issue too.

Windows 7 did not ask to be re-activated as we are running Windows 7 Enterprise x64 throughout our organization.

But, Office 2010 Professional Plus (Open Value) and Adobe Design Suite Premium CS3 both requested to be activated again:

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This hardware swap experience sure contrasts to how things were five, ten, or more years ago. In years past we would be hard pressed to save the OS and applications if we needed to change out the motherboard.

We have come a long way indeed.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

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