Yeah, Windows got a lot better at handling motherboard swaps.
I remember trying to do a PC overhaul with Windows 2000. I swapped out the motherboard, RAM, and CPU, and Windows would fail to boot, crashing with an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error. IIRC, I managed to recover without wiping the drive and doing a clean install by putting back in the old mobo/RAM/CPU, booting up, and swapping the IDE driver from a motherboard-specific driver to a generic IDE driver (Which comes at a signifcant performance penalty because I lost UDMA support), then swapping back to the new mobo. It booted fine after that, and I was able to install the proper motherboard drivers to get UDMA support on my IDE drive.
Back in the day, I had a drive of Windows 98 that had been through two or three very different motherboards. It was a good day if it bluescreened only once, because it usually did more often.
I remember trying to do a PC overhaul with Windows 2000. I swapped out the motherboard, RAM, and CPU, and Windows would fail to boot, crashing with an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error. IIRC, I managed to recover without wiping the drive and doing a clean install by putting back in the old mobo/RAM/CPU, booting up, and swapping the IDE driver from a motherboard-specific driver to a generic IDE driver (Which comes at a signifcant performance penalty because I lost UDMA support), then swapping back to the new mobo. It booted fine after that, and I was able to install the proper motherboard drivers to get UDMA support on my IDE drive.