Liftoff

The machine worked!

Only a few minor glitches, the fan on the back of the case wasn't plugged in properly, that was soon resolved. After that the Graphics card wasn't properly recognised by Vista which is ironic as it was more or less built for Vista. A quick scout around the Nvidia site identified what I needed and than I was away.

The Vista install was pretty nice, as I recall it has been streamlined over the XP one. Then everything was looking good - in fact large on the 22" widescreen.

I tried to play some music using media player and it started to refuse point blank or it would work intermittently. At first I wondered if it was the LaCie but it was playing fine to the other computers. A bit of messing about with driver downloads from the Asus site (the sound is on a daughterboard) and it started working as expected.

Overall it's looking good, there are a few annoying things in Vista but I will get used to them or work around them. The machine is blazingly fast, in fact the Microsoft analysis came up with 5 as the lowest score and that was only because it has 2Gb RAM, I'm about to buy another 2Gb so that should improve.

The only issue I have is, as to be expected for an "early adopter", that installing drivers that come with hardware is a bit hit and miss. Some of the software with the DVD writer complains and takes you to the software manufacturers website. I'm still not clear if the download it points you at is trial software or not, It seems a bit unfair if an XP install would give you the full application even if it was a lite edition