HP laptop

Hello BadKarma, and welcome to Seven Forums.

You're most likely not going to be able to replace the motherboard in the HP laptop unless the new motherboard you bought is specifically made to fit in and work with that specific model and of HP laptop. Usually it will not be.

What model number id your HP laptop?

We can look it up to see if it may already support installing a 64-bit Windows 7 on it.

You are courageous. Changing a mobo in a laptop is not a piece of cake. My guess is that you may have made a mistake when you rewired it.
But you can try this. If you have a windows installation disc, put it into the drive, start the PC and keep tapping ESC. Then you can change the load priority to CD/DVD reader.

From looking at what I could find below on that model of notebook, it appears to already support installing a 64-bit OS by default. It most likely just came with 32-bit installed, but can have 64-bit installed as is.

Have you tried installing Windows 64-bit on the default notebook?

From the driver download page for your model:
Software & Driver Downloads HP HDX X18T-1200 CTO Premium Notebook PC - HP Customer Care (United States - English)

The Intel Core 2 Quad Q9100 2.26 GHz processor that comes installed on the notebook is a 64-bit CPU:
Intel® Core)


If Windows 7 64-bit installs, then you might consider just returning the new motherboard to save money. If you insist on trying to upgrade the motherboard on the notebook, I would recommend taking it to a computer shop for them to do it. This way you'll be covered under a warranty for it as well.

The recovery partition should stay put. No reason for it to change if you reinstall into the original 32bit OS partition. Just do not wipe the whole HDD.

An even better idea is to burn the recovery DVDs from the recovery partition asap.