Im thinking of upgrading to vista ultimate, Im a newbie at this stuff and was wondering what I should expect in the upgrade. Do I need to do anything with my mobo drivers or bios ( asus M2N-e ) im sure Ill have to get new drivers for my video card ( 7600GT )... anything I need to watch out for??

thanks for the help.

Expect your operating system to have a downright ridiculous memory footprint (700 mb+)

Expect huge amounts of security issues.

Expect to click 'OK' over and over and over.

Expect buggy drivers from everyone.

Expect nVidia problems, lots and lots of them.

Expect microsoft to do something silly and have the whole industry re-doing the same work, as a result (for example, the virtual machine in XP)

Most of us in the know are in agreement- Vista is a pile of something, and that something has steam coming off it. Im not sure I'll ever run it, but if I do, it will be after the first service pack (maybe a year from now) comes out. Unless you wanna sound like you have tourettes syndrome, I strongly suggest you do the same.

Don't believe the FUD. Not a problem. I did it. If you can do a clean new install, that is the best. Most Vista problems come from incompatibilities with old residual junk. I upgraded in place without incident, but I was prepared to do a new install if necessary. Run the vista upgrade advisor first to see exactly what may be a problem. It runs ok with 1gb of memory, but 2 or more is better. It uses memory differently than XP. It loads things into memory that it anticipates that you might need, instead of paging things out to make room. The Nvidia drivers work just fine. If you will be trying 64-bit, then expect some issues, but they are the same issues as with 64-bit versions of windows.
Do you really need ultimate?

MJS don't let this guy scare you, yes, vista does use more memory but if your not retarded you'll get 2gigs of RAM and be fine, yes there are driver issues but that's the same for every new OS. Nvidia drivers are fine as mentioned but if you have a sound card you'll hit problems.

I'd suggest getting Home Premium rather than Ultimate.

My advice: dual-boot, don't upgrade. that way, if some nasty crap comes up, you still have a fall-back point (that's what I did, and it's working fine. Just make sure to re-partition your existing hard drive, or buy a new one for Vista).

Follow this guide: http://www.apcstart.com/5023/dual_ [...] with_vista

Don't use the version of GPartEd they link you to, it's outdated. Use the one on the top of this list: http://sourceforge.net/project/sho [...] _id=173828

Sure, Vista is wonderful. That's why Dell started making windows xp home and windows xp professional available as options on some of their computers again, just last week. Oh, and yeah, the nVidia drivers work fine with your hardware, all of those people threatening a class action lawsuit against nVidia about a month ago are insane. They were organizing under a website, nividiaclassaction.com until last week. Thousands of people. The issue was, nVidia kept killing forum threads related to certain issues.

Im not going to doubt for a second that there are people out there who arent having problems. But anyone claiming vista is problem free based on personal upgrade experience isnt reading tech news. All of the problems I mentioned exist, are current news items, and can be googled. Dont take my word for it, shop around some tech sites and do some reading. There are people in this world calling vista 'windows ME 2'. Remember that little MS gem? Im sure there were people in threads claiming how wonderfully their upgrades went back then, too.

I completely agree with the two gig ram recommendation.