Just a brief update...
The new machine is up and running... sorta-kinda.
Turns out that there's a lot more "Digital Rights Management" stuff than I'd really been aware of. My intention was just to transfer the OS hard drive directly and let it remain unchanged. However, many, many aspects of my system ceased to function after the "swap-out." Turns out that this is almost entirely due to "DRM" issues...
SO, I've saved off the contents of my hard drive and am now doing a full, clean-sheet OS reinstallation. Apparently, any time you update your motherboard and CPU some things'll barf on ya... far more than I ever imagined.
Yeah, I could've labored through with the bugs, and fixed them later, but that'll only make it more painful in the long run.
I HATE DRM. This is the sort of thing that makes me almost... ALMOST... support software piracy.




ANYTHING to get rid of the evils of DRM.
How the hell does DRM figure into this? This I
gotta hear.
It has to do with just how many things in a large, complicated installation of Windows are tied to DRM, and FAIL if the "keying" elements of those are disconnected.
For instance, Media Player failed after the "transfer." It didn't just refuse to open files, it CRASHED. Same with my DVD playback software. Interestingly, same with my KEYBOARD DRIVER, for some reason.
Oh, and every bit of Adobe software. And my CAD package.
Every single one of those was tied to DRM based upon my prior hardware setup. And most refuse to simply be "updated" or even to accept being uninstalled and reinstalled.
Eventually, I tried deleting the DRM directory (after backing it up, of course) and even that failed to help.
My point, Mariner, was pretty simple. Because of the pervasive, and let's be frank, largely inappropriate use of "digital rights management" technologies (which is getting more and more common all the time), it's difficult if not impossible to simply transfer an existing Windows installation from one "hardware configuration" to another.
So instead of just swapping out motherboards and being back where I was before, I'm now reinstalling Windows... and every bit of software associated with it... from scratch. That's the only way to remove the DRM ties completely without introducing a rats nest of errors.
These errors aren't based upon the operating system, or the applications, not being compatible with the new hardware in any way. They're due to someone using an overly invasive method of "copy protection." One which doesn't prevent piracy in any way, but which causes problems for those of us who prefer actually work within the rules.
I'm almost inclined to just get "cracks" for every piece of software I own, just so that I'll be able to upgrade hardware in the future without having to do complete clean-sheet reinstallations.
Now, for the record, the 64-bit installation was going to be entirely new anyway (it's a second boot partition, though). So I could, in theory, be running Pro/E now and working on the ship. Except that, now, I have a whole stack of OTHER things I have to do, too, and working on the hobby ship is lower priority than a number of other issues which I wasn't planning on having to deal with, but have to now.
And all of that is because of the pervasive, invasive, and "overly aggressive" (not to mention totally useless to combat piracy) use of DRM to prevent the installation of apps on different hardware. A "pirate" will use any of the dozens of ways to cheat the system. This only harms the "rule-following" types like myself.