can i use my old hard drives in my new comp and keep the files and os intact?

You can certainly keep your old files, but I would recommend installing your OS onto your new hard drive, as it will be faster and more reliable.

Edit sorry, you've not got a new drive. But you will most likely need to install a fresh copy of windows so it utilises your new hardware properly.

Back up all the data you want to keep somewhere safe (1 of your 2 drives if you have space) and then you should format the disk you want windows on., and install it.

Yes, but if you are wanting to keep the OS because it's XP and you are not wanting to switch to Vista, I recommend that you take the leap to Vista, it's really not the big deal that everyone is claiming it is, since SP1 was released, it's really just a fancier version of XP and runs the same.

Regardless of that, what you'll want to do is install the old hard drives into your new computer, assuming that you have room for them. If you have a custom case then you probably do, if you have a store-bought system then you might have room for one inside but likely not both.

To install it, make sure you are wearing an anti-static wrist strap (you can purchase one at any computer store, they're cheeeeap). Install the hard drives into the available empty hard drive slots, then install the drivers for them on your system.

Once you've got the drives recognized as existing on your system you're good to go, you can access the files on those drives by going through My Computer.

If you want the system to operate from the OS on one of those drives, then you simply go into the BIOS and change the master boot device to whichever one of those drives has your OS on it, save and exit, reboot your system, it should auto-boot from the drive you specified.

If you want to change it back, simply go back in and change the master boot device.

Hope this helps.

YES... Absolutely.

Get a copy of Acronis ECHO with Universal Recovery.

Use Acronis to Image your hard drive before upgrading any hardware.

Put the new hardware in and use Acronis with Universal Recovery. It will reset the HAL so that upon first boot, your computer finds and installs the drivers for the new hardware.

Yes..... you'll have to re-activate the XP license but you'll have your files/OS from your old system running on your new hardware.

the problem that you are going to have is drivers. as the new motherboard and video card have different drivers than the old computer had, you might get a blue screen at bootup. my advice to you would to be to get all of the files that you want to keep onto one of those drives. then, format the other drive and install a fresh copy of your O/S on it. install the other hard drive as a slave. i have found that when you move a hard drive from one machine to a machine that is very different, you are going to have some problems. also, if the new motherboard only supports serial ATA and the old drives are EIDE, you will have to either get a card to run the IDE, or get new hard drives.

Yes, that's possible, as long as you have available connector for the older hard drivers.