I've been using the new AVAdirect system I got a month ago, and so far so good. Had some initial problems with the SAS interface card not being happy in the slot it was in on the motherboard, but after moving it, it's been running along smoothly. This system is EXTREMELY quiet and doesn't get nearly as hot as the Velocity Micro system. Which, by the way, has been running fine as well after I pulled out those two 150gb raided drives and replaced them with the single 300gb drive. But honestly, I don't use it much any longer. Don't completely trust it, and it raises the temps in my den to sauna levels. I may pull out one of the video cards, as I don't see the need to have the two SLI'd cards there. Might even replace them both with a single nVidia 295 like I have in my AVA system. I'll cross that bridge when I need to get to it, though...
And I was surprised at Vista. It's not bad at all. I think it helps that I have that SSD drive as the boot drive and 12gb of ram, but it boots up VERY fast, and everything seems to load and run very quickly. I was worried about some of my apps not working on Vista, but so far the only thing I have tried that it wouldn't install was Norton Commander, which I have used for nearly forever. But I found a replacement called Free Commander which works just as well, so no big deal. Still have some apps I haven't tried loading onto the Vista system yet, but as long as they aren't so old that they are 16 bit apps, I believe they will work just fine.
I will tell you this, too, that a faster PC makes a world of difference in page loads from the internet. The difference between my old system and this Vista one is dramatic, to say the least. I think all those temp and cached files on the local PC make a huge difference when displaying web pages. That's where that SSD really shines, I think.
Actually, I did some disk speed tests and found out that the RAIDED SAS drives I have as Drive D are actually faster in through put than the SSD drive, but access time on the SSD blows the doors off of the SAS RAID array. So for small files being swapped around, the SSD is the way to go, but for larger files, the SAS drives would be the better choice. Fortunately, that is exactly the way I configured this system, figuring I would do most of my apps on drive D, and keep the SSD (drive C) primarily for the operating system and related utilities.
All in all I'm very pleased with this AVAdirect system, and pleasantly surprised with Vista.
Now I just have to figure out what to do with these three systems. I can't run all three of them in the den at the same time or my blood would begin to boil from the heat buildup. I may have to move one of them out to another room. But I have to admit, it sure is convenient to be able to run three different intensive tasks on each of the systems concurrently.
Oh yeah, I upgraded to IE8 on this Vista system as well, and so far it seems to work just fine. A little different from the older versions, but a bit snappier and so far no glitches. Perhaps Microsoft has finally figured out that they aren't the only game in town and need to provide software that actually works and people can count on.
Just pickin' at ya, of course.