My latest, built this week, is an Antec fusion V2 case, Assus P5VL-M mobo, 8500gt Asus Graphics card (overkill really), Creative audigy 7.1 soundcard, Hauppauge Win Tv 500 dual dvbt tv card, 2 gig DDR ram & 2 x 500 gig Western digital caviar HDD's on Vista home premium.
Where I would expect Vista to be a pain, I've found the biggest difficulty to be the Antec vfd display,which doesn't work very well. However, everything else is humming. Something to bear in mind - if you intend to build a media centre to watch tv & videos with, then I would recommend getting hold of Nvidia pure video decoder & using ffdshow tryouts for a video codec. Don't use xvid or divx with windows media centre - xp mc will not play mpegs/avi files & Vista mc will just crash. Ffd which is a free download works across the board.
One irritation, I build my systems with OEM copies of windows. This time, I removed Vista & formatted the HDD in my old machine, rebuilt it with XP & then built my new one with my copy of Vista. So fair enough it comes up as already activated, so I phone MS who refuse to activate it because OEM copies are for one build only, even though it's only on one build, they won't activate it because it's been on a previous build.
I would have done better to lie & say my HDD died & that's why it's been rebuilt. I think that's harsh, so I've got round it my own way, which I won't divulge on here since it's probably not legal, but I'm not coughing up twice for a copy of windows for one machine.
