1. Don't buy any nVidia 680i based board. They're all buggy as hell.

2. Especially don't buy the Abit IN9 32X-MAX WiFi board as the BIOS is even buggier than the chipset inside it. The main feature of the board is that you can connect two nVidia graphics cards with a full 16 PCI Express lanes for both. The problem is that there is a power connector right under where the secondary card goes and you can't use it with a standard height Molex plug.

3. Don't install the nVidia IDE driver. Stay with the standard Microsoft one. You'll get a 30 second or so hang every so often in Vista if you do. After 30 seconds its back to normal again. You'll probably see lots of "Reset to device \Device\RaidPort0 was issued" in your system event log around about the same time as well. Apparently its a known issue but no fix from nVidia.

4. Vista whilst shiny is dog slow and incompatible with basically everything you've currently got. Be prepared to upgrade or buy new versions of everything.

5. UAC is annoying as hell. Don't really want to turn it off as that breaks things because installation paths/files change.