I am wondering whether there might be more to SP2 than I previously thought.

I will explain..

Customer machine, XP2 Pro SP2, ECS K7VZA Mobo, Duron 1300, 256 SDRAM, GF4 graphics, 40 gig hdd.

Comes in for repair - no boot.

A quick peek inside the box showed that numerous caps had bulged to the point of extinction, usual tests prove mobo dead.

Install new mobo (K7S5A - the closest I could find to the original), CPU fan and Antec PSU with otherwise all original parts.

Fire her up & set up BIOS options then on spec, just let her go expecting the usual blue screen entailing windows repair install - but it didn't happen!!!

Machine booted fine, albeit in 16 colours 640 x 480. It then set about installing automatically all the drivers for the new board (all SIS - the old board had a VIA chipset) including sound, LAN, usb, etc. No CD in the drive either!!!

On reboot all was back as it should be - wierd in the extreme. It made what I expected to be a long job into a very short & easy one!!

I did have a good hard look at the machine but could not find any sign of a backup copy of XP anywhere on the drive, neither any "hidden" partition (though as it's a generic machine built locally (not by us) this would be unlikely)

I have never had this happen before when replacing a mobo in XP. In fact, even when the chipsets were both the same, a repair install has often been necessary!!

I even carried out a virtually identical excercise a few months ago with similar mobos (many of the old K7VZA's are approaching the end of their useful lives) and had to do a repair install then, in fact the only difference I can find here was that SP2 was installed.

Not knowing too much about the history of this machine I wondered could it have once been used with an SIS chipset and just picked up on old existing drivers in the file system? The customer, however, is adamant that it was new when he bought it and that it has never before broken down so.....

Did I just get lucky? Or could there more to SP2 than I suspected??

John