In geekspeak, swapping out the guts means moving the hard drive from one system to another system. The hard drive, after all, has the operating system, program, and data that you used on your old system. Moving the hard drive from one system to the other could save quite a bit of time -- or not!

There's an interesting thing that happens when you install Windows. The operating system takes stock of its surroundings and writes information about your system into its Registry (and a couple of other places). This includes information about your process, memory, and peripherals.

Change out your peripherals, no problem. Change the amount of memory, no problem. Change the processor? Big problem.

If you're running with a Windows edition older than XP, the only way to fix the problem is to wipe the hard drive, reinstall the operating system, and start fresh. Windows XP is a little smarter -- but only a little. If you have Windows XP on the hard drive, you can move the drive to a new system but still need to do a system reinstall. Your data and programs remain intact, but stick XP on the system so it recognizes the new processor.

Of course, the ironic part of this whole scenario (moving the hard drive) is that if you were able to do it successfully, you would also be moving all the clutter from your old system to your new.