Vista - Vista x64 Ultimate working good so far

It installed in 18 minutes. It did ask for 56GB instead of 40GB. I figured its 40GB + 16GB (ram in the workstation). Once I created drive E:, it moved the paging file from C:. It is still 16GB. I did turn off UAC. I will leave it off till I am done installing apps. Avast Pro 4.8 is working well. O&O Defrag 10 did a complete / name defrag after a few attempts. Error Checking went fast. It did do one strange thing. It counted each % on free space check in separate entries. I did follow some of the tweaks like having all 8 cores on boot up. I added the 12MB L2 cache in the registry. I moved Windows mail to E:. It did not clean up after the move. I moved documents folder to E:. I don't like stuff on C: All the scores were 5.9s. I figured with the level of hardware. I did install all the latest firmware and drivers for all the hardware. Still need to install the printers tonight. I did use my USB thumb drive to flash my LSI Logic 8708EM2 SAS RAID controller. I was able to boot from it. The motherboard has latest BIOS rev. It fixed a USB boot issue. I moved the tape drives to my other workstation in the basement. I used Veritas Backup Exec 12 with a remote Vista x64 agent to backup across the 1 Gbps CAT 6 connection. It did 1600 MB/min or 33.3 MB/second. It was not defragged yet.

The eyecandy is not as bad as I heard. Performance wise, its faster than XP x64 SP2. Memory bandwidth is testing faster. I am still finding things. Took a while to find the screen saver settings to disable it. I also disabled power management.

I did enable the RAID 1 cache in device manager. One the 8708EM2 battery charged it is now in adaptive write back mode. The SAS RAID is very reactive to data transfers.

I installed Oblivion last night. I might try it tonight.

I have to change a share on my other workstation so it shows up. I can access it by \\name\d$. I will add a share name tonight. No issues seeing the Linux Redhat Fedora shares and my XP Pro workstaition. I am going to build a XP x64 SP2 workstation from my old Tyan Thunder K8WE board, dual AMD 280 Opterons (pair of dual core 2.4s), and 8GB of RAM. It has PCie and PCI-X on it.

Hi SCSI,

You might like to checkout our Tutorials - Vista Forums for some sweet tricks on your new Vista machine...

Steven

I have been reading them.

Supermicro X7DWA-N server board
pair of Intel E5430 2.66 GHz 1333 MHz FSB Xeons (8 cores)
16GB of DDR667 RAM

So far, its fast without much tweaking. The SAS RAID does help. I have room for 14 more 2.5" SAS drives.