Sean Gerety

My new box full of Vista with multi-touch gesture support

So I've been quiet for a while, here's a couple of reasons. One is I've got a new box to run Vista. Here's some of the components that I've got in it.
motherboard - http://evga.com/products/moreinfo.asp?pn=122-CK-NF68-AR
chip - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819115002
video card - http://www.bfgtech.com/8800GTS_640_PCIe.html
case - http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=81800
http://www.antec.com/productImageInside.php?ProdID=81800
memory (2 gigs) - http://www.patriotmem.com/products/detailp.jsp?prodline=5&catid=2&prodgroupid=38&id=581&type=1
power supply - http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&articID=511
DVD burner - http://shop1.outpost.com/product/4367295
Hard Drive - http://www.maxtorsolutions.com/en/catalog/Internal_SATA/ (320 gig )

I was going to look at possibly buying a high end box like the Dell XPS, however I could get the above box for about $1000 less than the Dell. Putting the box together only took a day with the hardest part being shoehorning the power supply in the bottom. Plus, I had to pull the 120 mm fan out of the bottom, however it did go to the middle section and will keep everything nice and cool. The box is pretty quiet, which is nice.

I've installed Vista Ultimate on it and it runs like a champ. The only pain that I encountered was from my GeForce 8800 GTS not having any drivers for Vista. That was definitely a WTF moment. How could a cutting edge card not even have any beta drivers? So that put my Vista Experience Meter at 1.0. No Aero for me.

So I called the support line over at BFG tech (lifetime 24/7 support, which rocks) and talked with the rep who informed me that there are no drivers for Vista. WTFO? However! He did recommend that I check out www.guru3d.com . Kudos to the forum at guru3d.com. They had a driver on the forum for my 8800, which took my Vista Experience level to 5.0. See below.

Another thing is that I've had a Fingerworks keyboard for about 5 years. It's been great and I get all that gesture support that Apple fanboy's are swooning over with the iPhone. I hooked it up to my new Vista box and it worked great right from the start.
So now that I've been playing with it for a week, here's some impressions.
1. Driver support needs to be stronger. (Especially from high end product producers. (cough - Nvidia))
2. Where's my DirectX 10 games? (I love my 360, but this system rocks).
3. I love the look and feel of Vista.
4. The sidebar is nice, but I'm not sure about what happens when people load it up with widgets beyond maybe ten?
5. I love WPF apps on Vista, I pulled down a bunch from www.thirteen23.com and they look great.
6. I've also found out that I'm getting tried of app's that have to run all the time (Quicktime and iTunes?) and lodge themselves in the taskbar. If you have that hard of a time starting up, look at how your app runs. (Sorry that was a UX rant)

Once I get everything setup on my new Vista box, I'll see how Vista runs on my old box. (I'll probably need to throw more RAM at it. We'll see).