Bear with me, this is an odd one… I’m reviving an old XP Home PC, and I’ve just bought a replacement motherboard off eBay. The old one failed ten years ago, and at the time it wasn’t worth trying to fix; but prices of refurbished motherboards has come down in the meantime.
However – in the intervening years, I ‘borrowed’ the graphics card while troubleshooting another machine and didn’t put it back afterwards. Now I have a choice of two PCI Express cards that might belong, and I can’t remember which one it is. I figure I have a choice between two paths.
- Put one of the cards in and fire up the machine. If it works, fine; if it asks for drivers, it must have been the other card. Would there be any risk involved in doing this, bearing in mind that Windows might also take me to task over the replacement motherboard?
- Examine the boot disk using another machine to see what drivers it has installed. Where would be the best place to look? One slight problem might be that one of the candidate cards is unknown make, so I don’t have a manufacturer’s name to search for.
Any ideas welcome – thanks in advance!
(Further details in case they’re helpful: the motherboard is an MSI P4N Diamond SLI. The old one failed because the fan failed on the Northbridge chip and fried it. I kept the hard drives that were in the machine at the time, and backed them up – everything except that graphics card! – but I’m reasonably confident that it’s one of the two PCI Express cards I have wrapped up in anti-static bags. The missing plate on the back of the machine is opposite PCI Express slot 1. I have the manufacturer’s driver disk, but it’s a generic one which has drivers for everything they ever made.)
