Well here's an update on where I'm at now after recovering from the HDD failure of about a month ago. Along with some insight into installing Vista64 (ultimate edition)
Got my 2 new 7200 rpm 500 gig drives and realized that I just wasn't going to be happy without 10k drives for running my games. So I put in another order for a pair of 70 gig 10k drives.
Amazon delivered quickly once more, and I now have the dual 10k drives installed Raid0 as a single 130 gig array for my OS, working/gaming drive. I put those slower dual 500s in a network storage device (LinkSys NAS200) as a RAID1 array and I now have a seperate place to store all my family photos, videos and music. The NAS200 is slower than Christmas for large backups but for the kind of individual movement of smallish photo/music/video files that I need it's going to work well. (Don't buy one as a backup device for your entire HD though, it's just not cutout for that type of work.)
For my HD backup I kept my 200 gig IDE drive (reformatted to NTFS) as a backup device for shooting images of my RAID0 pair. I think I'm all set now on storage, redundancy and backup management.
I chose to go with Vista64 this round for the OS and have been met with all the expected agony of trying to get all the 64 bit drivers working. I even flashed the latest BIOS for my ASUS moboard although in hindsight, I'm not sure it was necessary and it may have caused me some new problems. So far what I've taken away from the whole process is that when installing Vista less seems to be better.
Less in the sense that your best bet is to just:
1) install the Vista OS as is, with the possible exception of having a RAID driver disk ready to insert in the process (hate that I'm still dealing with 3.5 floppies for stuff like this)
2) Once you have a version of Vista running (forget loading any extra drivers at this point), plug in your ethernet cable and go straight to Windows Update and give Vista a chance to hunt for and que up all the drivers for you. I was pleasantly surprised that Vista not only pulled up 50 or so standard windows updates, but it also listed about a half-dozen optional ones that were specifically aimed at my nVidia chipset, GPU, LinkSys wireless card, onboard RealTek audio, Sil Raid drivers, as well as a few others... I could've saved myself about a day of data and driver gathering if I would've just let Vista have it's way right from the start. I think all the the drivers I tried to install were overwritten with better versions that Vista found for me anyway.
3) My one word of caution has to do with GPU driver updates that Vista recommends. Do not underestimate the value of being able to actually see
the workspace. I made the mistake of choosing to install all the optional goodies in one shot and was met with a "video source undetected" message from my monitor. Sounded like everything loaded OK, but couldn't actually see anything.
Presently, I'm in the process of debugging my last issue with Vista64. Which is installing the one optional nVidia driver for my GPU. I'm glad I took the time to shoot an image of my system to that secondary drive, cuz I've had to reimage the RAID0 pair a couple times now after not being able to get a video display.
I'm going to look into maybe seeing if a different monitor makes any difference...
My Logitech G15 keyboard has useable Vista64 drivers... even my Saitek X52 FCS (almost shockingly) had 64 bit drivers available. Although I think there might be issues with a couple of the X52 HID devices (the mini-mouse gadgets) that I may need to hunt down.
Once I get the GPU driver issue sorted then THEN I'll actually be able to try to run a game on the thing. We'll see what pain that causes later... I suspect there will be sorrow
, but such is life when tinkering with a new OS.