I had a new PC built with Vista Business, but these issues could affect any version of Vista.

RAID – I suppose there is a bulletproof RAID-Zero configuration that is favorable to Microsoft, but it caused issues with me. After a few days, I couldn’t do an installation repair because the Vista install DVD couldn’t properly recognize my drive. Loading the software RAID Drivers helped a small bit, but not where I could do anything. When Vista is being installed on clean drives with no MBRs, it will work as long as it either recognizes the RAID or the appropriate driver is loaded. Doing an installation repair requires the CDROM Drive to be the first boot selection in BIOS; which causes a conflict in the Vista Installer because it requires your hardrive to be the first boot device in BIOS.

High-Speed SATA Drives – I had initially chosen RAID-Zero to boost speed, but life was much more simplified by taking the RAID (and software drivers) out of the equation and spending a few extra dollars on a Western Digital 10,000 RPM drive.

Adobe CS3 Products – Illustrator CS3 was the primary motivator to give up on my 5+ year old WinXP PC, because of installation challenges. However, there are several documented cases of new Vista PCs and Laptops having to be wiped clean and re-imaged in order to have a successful Adobe CS3 Software install. I spent some time with Adobe on this, but even though practically everything else installed fine an Adobe CS3 product may fail to install unless it is a clean machine. I installed both Illustrator and Photoshop CS3 before my Vista PC came off of the workbench. I installed Dreamweaver CS3 a couple weeks later without issues. Weird.

Use ATI – PC Gamers may argue this in favor of NVIDIA, but for the rest of us make life easy on yourself and invest in a good ATI card.

Use AMD – Intel is still the weapon of choice for my servers, but AMD is great for desktops.

Use ASUS – I’ve got some gripes about their RAID drivers, but once that was out of the equation I found their motherboard very easy to use.

Acer Monitors are suprising – I was sold a Acer AL2216W with my PC, with an encouragement to return it if I wasn’t completely satisified. It was an inexpensive monitor, but very impressive.

AVG AntiVirus and Internet Security are impressive products. I still use Symantec/Norton for my WinXP machine, and may consider Norton Utlities for my Vista machine, but I think AVG is an excellent AntiVirus and Security solution.

Vista isn’t perfect, but it will work for now …

I don’t know what caused the issue, but for some reason WinXP was moving to a slow crawl. Initially I thought it was related to it’s slow hardrive, but after a while it was apparent that something was slowing it down bad.

So I pulled out the Vista CD that Gateway sent me earlier this year, along with an associated driver CD and wiped the hardrive clean of all partitions so that the install could do it’s magic.

I know Vista is receiving a lot of bad press, and it’s big-news SP1 update is coming soon, but I’ve got to say that running it with the current updates and AGV isn’t that bad. Previous issues like my PC-Card software have been resolved, as just about everything has a version for Vista now.