My production desktop Vista Install - How my experience bombed big time

Ok, I lost faith that I will run Vista on a daily basis around here any time soon. Last weekend I thought I would cannibalize a terminal server not being used in the office, and make it one of my production desktops. I thought it met the Vista requirements, being that it had:

• Hyperthreaded Pentium4 running at 3 Ghz
  
• 2 GB ram
  
• 2 x 120GB SATA drives with a hardware RAID1 controller
  
• I expected to put my ATI Radeon 9550 video card in there, which would give me enough 'umf' the run Aero glass in Vista.
  

Lets just say it wasn't meant to be. The Feb CTP just didn't want to play nice.

First off, Vista wouldn't find the hardware RAID controller. I was thinking of going to a software RAID config anyways, and pulled it and put the SATA drives right on the motherboard. Since I cracked the case open, I thought it was time to put the video card in. One problem.. no AGP slots. Apparently this motherboard uses the newer PCI Express, which meant I was out of luck for using my ATI video card. My bad for not looking beforehard.

So I thought I would just do the install and get it going. I figured I could run out and pick up a half decent video card later.

Install went somewhat smoothly, although when it rebooted I had to hard start it. That appeared to be a bios issue on my part, but I don't recall the TS ever having to be powered on manually before. Oh well.

When Vista finally came up for the first time, I quickly realized I wasn't going to have a good night. Apparently Vista doesn't like my hardware. Plain and simple. It was SO SLOW. To be fair though, the CTP apparently is full of debug info and has a lot of monitoring stuff. It is a beta afterall. And I am sure hardware support will be more forthcoming as release date comes near. But thats less than a year away. And this hardware is like a year old. And Vista had a hard time figuring out how to use it. HAL... WAKE UP!

My motherboard is a Gigabyte 8I915G-MF. It's one of those boards that has integrated LAN/Audio/Video. Well, Vista doesn't recognize the audio or the LAN. Kind of a useless machine for me if I can't get network access or listen to tunes. I scoured Google and Gigabyte's website looking for some beta Vista drivers, to no avail. I tried the Windows Server 2003 drivers. Nope. I tried the XP drivers. Nope. I went to report in the Windows beta newsgroup, only to realize I never activated my account to allow posting. So I activated it and was promptly told I have to wait till the next day before posting. I decided to call it a night.

I haven't had a chance yet to post to the private newsgroup, which I will have to do one of these nights. But as it stands now, I have a large brick of Vista bits sitting in the corner. I was so looking forward to trying to run Vista on a daily basis, but its just not in the cards. Not sure if I should fight through getting it running, or repave it and put something else on it. Who knows. Maybe some DDK god will poke the Gigabyte devs and get them to throw out some beta drivers. *sigh*