OK, so my last post was perhaps a little to vitriolic, but I was pretty pissed.   I kept getting an empty blackscreen after the first reboot.  Anyway, I will say that Microsoft’s tech support was helpful, I only wish I hadn’t needed to call them.  It turns out I had to unplug all my USB devices to install Vista.  Wow, never would have thought of that.  I’m pretty computer saavy and I’m beginning to wonder how normal people ever get this crap to work.

Oh, even better, I had to download a driver from Dell (for my hard drive, which admittedly is Raid) to get it to do a clean install.  What fun.  I had to guess which driver.

Anyway, I finally got it working.  Although I’m still languishing in the world of 1280×800 which really pisses me off.  But I finally got to the bottom of it.  Apparently this is nVidia’s fault.  The nVidia 8800 GTX (top end video card) is stuck in 1280×800 because of a driver problem.  So if you are considering Vista, an nVidia 8800 card, and/or an Apple 30″ LCD… they do not currently work together.  Supposedly the Dell 30″ works.  Here is the quote: