brownbagel

Thanks for all the advice.

I built my first PC 2 years ago and now i'm thinking about making some upgrades. As far as I know, for most parts, you can simply replace the component and call it a day (RAM, PSU, GPU, CPU- if compatible). But what about replacing your motherboard or storage drives? Can I simply replace my motherboard and use the same boot drive and storage drive? If I want a new boot drive, can I just copy everything from my current boot drive to the new one? For a storage drive with files and games on it (non-boot drive), can I move it to a new PC and access everything? Personally I would like to preserve all my programs and preferences on my PC since it usually takes a long time to get everything in check. A while back I had to replace my boot drive because it was constantly having reading errors and crashing windows, and I had to reinstall windows, configure everything, and I even uninstalled and reinstalled everything on the storage drive because a lot of files wouldn't open/ wouldn't be recognised. So I guess my main question is whats the best way to replace motherboards and drives?