I just built a new system for a friend and I had numerous and various blue screens and other errors installing vista. I finally got it installed and it is being very slow. It seems like the hard drive is louder than it should be and sounds strange. Some things are working fine though. Web browsing seems responsive enough, except for the time the browser installed the flash player. I can download files quickly. Just now when I tried to extract a zip file I downloaded (13mb), it says it is extracting at 3 bytes/sec and doesn't seem to get anywhere... It is a raptor drive, but even a normal drive shouldn't be this slow. I will time vista's boot time as soon as this unzip process will cancel.
OK, vista load time is about 4.5 minutes. I am thinking write performance is good, but read is not. I downloaded bootable cd images from WD at
http://support.wdc.com/download/downloadxml.asp (both tools and diagnostics for dos). They boot fine on my personal machine, but not on the one I am trying to test. It obviously boots fine from the vista dvd, but not these cd's I made. So I'm not sure how to tell for sure what is wrong with it.