New
#1
Motherboard failure and Windows 7 recovery
After recently upgrading to Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit, first my old graphics card melted, which I successfully replaced, and now my motherboard recently crapped itself. I've replaced it with a different motherboard and had to upgrade my RAM, but still retained the old CPU. Windows 7 now won't load, I presume because the existing drivers are incompatible. I am really, really keen not to have to do a complete reinstall of Windows 7 (because my wife has all her Outlook contacts on the HD and hasn't backed them up and she will make my life a complete misery if I can't recover them ). However, I notice there is no 'rebuild' function for Windows 7. I have been led to believe that if I delete the old MoBo and RAM drivers then Windows 7 is clever enough to load without them and download new ones from the Internet but am unsure how to go about this. None of the safe mode functions seem to allow this. I also understand that the Windows OEM might not accept my old product key but would be happy if I even got to that stage at this point!
I'm sure I'm not the first for this to have happened. Has anyone else come up with a creative solution?