I finally upgraded my home PC to Vista Ultimate. I was originally worried about compatibility issues and performance. It’s an older PC, approximately 5-6 years old, built by me. It’s a testament to home built PC’s everywhere that it’s still running at all.

From the point of its conception my Home PC has only been upgraded three times. The first was by necessity when the motherboard failed after a year of building it. The second was when I went from the ATI Radeon 9000 to the ATI Radeon 9600xt graphics card. The third upgrade was the combination of my Server and Home PC. In that case the only upgrade was moving the dual 250Gb SATA Raid 1 array and the Antec NeoPower 480 PSU from the server. I guess that makes it more of a migration than an upgrade.

My PC has now been running vista good and strong for over a week. I haven’t yet run the vista experience test yet, I’m worried it’ll flunk with flying colors.

I’ve only had two small problems thus far.

The first is my sound card a SoundBlaster Live! is no longer supported. Apparently there won’t ever be drivers released either, although I find that hard to believe because its a fairly common sound card. For me this wasn’t a huge issue as i’ve been using my onboard sound for years now. The only reason I still have the card in my machine is for voice communication (ie: TeamSpeak or Ventrillo) and I haven’t used that in over a year. I guess it’s time to take it out?

The second issue I ran into was my RAID controller was unsupported. My motherboard is a Soyo Dragon KT600 Plus v2.0. The RAID controller wasn’t detected by the Windows Update Advisor as an issue and so I knew nothing about it beforehand. The first place I checked was naturally Soyo’s site which had plenty of drivers just none for vista.

Luckily the Raid Controller is still at least semi popular and after doing some searching (and asking a friend who has used vista for a few months now) I happened across drivers for the via vt8237 Raid Controller. And now my computer is all set and running pretty. Can’t believe it but the thing is running smoother than it did on XP Pro for the past 5 years. I even have Aero enabled and the machine only has 1Gb of RAM. We’ll see how long this lasts.