I just thought I'd share my lastest bit of ♥ for Windows Vista. A little background first...
Most geeks know when you replace a motherboard, you generally have two things that you can do with your existing Windows installation. First option, and the one I highly recommend for Windows XP, flatten the box and start fresh. Yup, that's right, format the thing and hope and pray that you saved all your important data on a separate partition/drive/removable media. The second method, one I usually do NOT recommend, is repairing the existing installation using the repair option in Windows XP setup. The latter method I only recommend in situations where there is data on the drive that the end user needs access to.
Now with that said, I recently upgraded my computers motherboard, processor, RAM, and video card. My system has been running Windows Vista RC1, flawlessly I might add, and I really didn't have any critical data on any of the two hard drives. So out with the old hardware and in with the new!
Now normally when I get a new motherboard, I'll put in the RAM, CPU, and video card in and boot up the board on the bench just to verify the board is working before I spend the trouble getting it mounted into the case. This time I didn't bother and had a bit of a heart attack when I first threw the switch and didn't get anything. No fans whirring, no lights blinking, absolutely nothing. I decided to stick with the old power supply, and got a 20 to 24 pin adapter so I could use it with the new motherboard. My first thought was that the adapter wasn't cutting it and I needed a new power supply. Looking closer, I found that I didn't have the 20 pin connector from the power supply fully seated into the 20 pin side of the adapter cable. Fixed that and off she goes! -=whew=- Got into the BIOS and configured everything as I saw fit.
Now, just for the heck of it, I wanted to see how Vista would handle being ripped out of its old home, and booted in a completely foreign environment. Now, keep in mind, when you replace a motherboard, more then likely everything is going to change, and the biggest problem for Windows is usually the difference in hard drive controllers. In Windows XP this usually meant a blue screen on boot, no matter if you chose safe mode or not. Sometimes you got lucky if the chipsets were from the same vendor(My old motherboard has the Intel 875P w/ICH5R chipset, while the new one has the Intel P965 w/ICH8R), and maybe that's what happened in my situation, because much to my surprise, after I chose to start the system in safe mode, the Vista logon screen appeared! I logged in, and there it was in all its glory. Now keep in mind I'm still in safe mode, but I have a working desktop! I checked device manager and was flabbergasted to only see one bang in the whole list, a "Consumer IR devices". Only thing left to do was reboot normally and see what happens. Jaw dropped again, even the display driver updated itself, as I went from a Nvidia 6800GT to a ATI X1900GT.
I don't know what kinda voodoo is going on in that there Windows Vista, but I'm impressed. If this experience is any indication, I know a lot of my enthusiast buddies that like to build their own PC's are going to be impressed as well. Basically all you have to do is transplant the hard drive with your existing Vista install into a new PC and bam, you're up and running!