When I remove a piece of hardware from a computer (such as the video card) I usually go into the System control panel and uninstall the associated driver and hardware device before physically removing the hardware. Should I follow the same procedure when doing a CPU upgrade? I am confident in uninstalling the CPU drivers but am unsure whether I should uninstall the CPU hardware device, since I am actually using it at the time. The computer is running Windows XP.

The procedure you are following for upgrading components in your computer is quite well thought-out, which is very good to see. However, you shouldn’t need to uninstall the hardware component through Windows before the physical removal of the hardware. Uninstalling the drivers through the System control panel will remove the installed drivers, which has the advantage of removing drivers for devices which are no longer connected to the computer. That said, Windows ships with so many drivers pre-installed a few more drivers will not make that much difference. Additionally, leaving the drivers means that if you wish to reinstall the device in the future the drivers are already installed on your system so the device should be installed immediately. Uninstalling the hardware device through the System control panel is also not necessary, as when you power-down the machine and then physically remove the hardware and restart, Windows will realise that you no longer have the device connected to the computer and will uninstall the device. Further, occasionally if you attempt to uninstall the device yourself then Windows may automatically redetect then reinstall the device, negating the benefit of manually uninstalling the device from the System control panel. So, while I don’t see manually uninstalling the device as causing any problems, it is really just an unnecessary step in the upgrade process.

Relating back to your question about uninstalling the CPU hardware device prior to physically upgrading the CPU there is no need to complete that process, nor uninstall the drivers for the CPU prior to the upgrade. If you uninstall the CPU device through the System control panel I doubt that this will cause any problems, since this is just Windows recognition of the CPU rather than telling Windows to stop using the CPU all together. In fact, for those who are running Windows Vista you may find that after upgrading your CPU the information and details for the CPU are not updated within the Task Manager. In this case, the advice in a Microsoft Knowledge Base article (support.microsoft.com/kb/930861) is to uninstall the CPU device within the Task Manager, reboot and then reinstall the processor.

So, if you wish to continue to uninstall the devices through Windows before physical removal of the devices then I don’t foresee that this will create any problems. However, it is probably an unnecessary step which you can avoid.