I have a working Win XP IDE drive which is full of programs, which works on an 8-year-old ASUS IDE motherboard. I tried my HD with an Athlon II X2 215 dual CPU and Ultra 1GB PC5400 667 MHz DDR2 memory on an MSI SATA-IDE motherboard, and it is much faster, and using a partition reproduction program I backed up successfully to a SATA drive, but the MSI board is so cheap that I can't get onto the internet. The ethernet connector is defunct.

I am giving up on it. If I buy an ASUS M4A785-M motherboard and put my DDR2 memory and Athlon II dual CPU on it, and start out just using my working IDE drive, can I connect up my two speakers, my microphone, my USB connector scanner, my ethernet connector DSL cable to the motherboard and start flying immediately without video, audio or any other cards? It looks like a reasonable solution for not too much money. That's the question. I have a WIN XP program CD.

I may have partly fried the MSI motherboard because I can't get sound out of it in addition to not being able to get onto the internet. The MSI board is not my problem. I just want to know if I buy the new dual-CPU ASUS motherboard, if I will be in business without buying any cards for it. As for going back to my old IDE board, I gave it away.

You just can't put a hard drive from one computer into another and expect it to work because it won't due to driver and registry conflicts. That would be why you can't get anything to work. Besides, a copy of windows branded from a certain manufacturers can only be used in that manufacturer's computers.