Parts used:
- Microsoft's Vista Home Premium Operating System - DVD
- Grisoft AVG Anti-virus Program - Vista Ready (free download)
The BIOS that is on the Gigabyte motherboard is by "Award." There is not much to do to get the computer working, just look at a few menus and set a few top level things (the date and time is one example). The Gigabyte BIOS has extensive overclocking capabilities if you want to push your system past its "redline." For my purposes, the only fancy things I needed to do in BIOS was set up the two (2) hard drives in a mirrored RAID configuration -- this was easy and worked fine - and finally to tell the BIOS to boot from the DVD instead of a floppy first. This is needed to get the Windows Vista installation program started.
Everything was as smooth and easy as you could hope for until I tried to install Vista. Vista didn't like the mirrored RAID setup and really crashed hard. It took a while for me to figure out that RAID was the problem since the Vista error messages were less than worthless. I went back to the BIOS and reformatted the hard drives as two(2) separate drives. Vista liked that setup better and actually pretended to work but at the very last step it repeatedly stalled. Once again, no error message even remotely hinting at what problem Vista was having. Since going to a simpler hard drive setup got Vista almost there, I decided poor Vista might be confused by seeing two drives -- so in BIOS I reformatted for about the 6th time and this time I told the BIOS I only had one drive. Vista installed. On reboot the BIOS recognized the second drive and so did Vista. I decided I would not try to fix Vista's problem with the RAID setup, I would just go with having two separate hard drives.
Once at the Vista desktop, there are lots of things to configure and update including Vista itself, drivers, etc. The network settings configured themselves automatically and as soon as I hit the desktop I was able to surf the net. It is nice when things work like they should! BTW: I haven't benchmarked it, but the pooter feels very fast :-). The digital KVM worked great for switching back and forth between the old PC and new PC. Since Grisoft has their nice and free antivirus program updated for Vista, I immediately downloaded and installed it. Works great - recommended.
Now that the computer is up and running and everything that has been tested seems to work, it is time to add some finishing touches!