Messing with Vista and its lack of SATA drivers reminded me that I do in fact have room for four SATA drives in this rig. I didn't get one when I set it up because a) I had several spare IDEs and b) they seemed expensive at the time. However, prices seem to have dropped now, and I picked up a 250MiB drive for a mere £60.

But what to install..? I already had WinXP and Vista dual-booting, so how about Linux? I tried Fedora Core 5 because I had the DVD around from upgrading my existing Fedora box.

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Vista is now back on the partition, if only because deleting it doesn't remove the new bootloader, and only Vista comes with the command line utility that allows you to edit it and set Win XP as the default.

So I messed around a bit more, before I had to switch back to XP to fix a little stuff at work (cygwin doesn't seem to work under Vista, so I can't ssh to the servers to run VNC). Still haven't got the Audigy drivers working, though random dribblings on the Intarwebs indicate there is some way of doing it... though Bill alone knows which ones will work for me.

I get the feeling there's some sort of sexist Vista-celebrity comparison that could be made, along the lines of Vista being the Pamela Anderson of operating systems: from a distance it looks gorgeous, but up close you can see how many man-hours have been put into achieving this - and if you actually use it, you get Hep C...

(I posted that before seeing this...)

Interesting, if flowery, piece on some of the reasons why Windows Vista has slipped so much (I tried it yesterday - the partition has already been re-purposed, largely down to the very annoying UAC system):

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