A few amplifications, although I don't really know why I'm expending the effort since these pages aren't easily accessible once they scoll away into the HB hinterlands. So, If nothing else, just to set the record straight.

Vista will play your CDs fine. The new Windows Media Player looks and performs well. You can even rip and burn CDs there. Existing WAVs and MP3s also sound as good or better than ever in WMP.

Additionally, Sony Sound Forge 7 - at least in a limited looksee - also seems to function normally.

It is with my two audio sequencing and composing packages that I've experienced problems. Cakewalk MC3 is non-functional; with coaxing, I can get it to play one track out of several, and then with no effects. Magix Music Studio 10 approaches its performace under XP, but when I tried to tweak the audio driver settings, the program refused to restart. After 20 minutes of failed attempts to start the ap, I removed and reinstalled it, but still no joy. A quick white x/red ball warning pops up, and before you have a chance to read what it says, another dragless window obscures it with two choices to shut down the ap. That went on for another 20 minutes, and out of renewed exasperation, I recranked cakewalk for a few minutes to jack with it some more. Then, when I went back to Magix and revved, the red ball came back, but this time it let me click off and the ap started "normally."

In ME and XP, it is possible, nay simple, to record from one application into another across the desktop. So, for example, if I haven't been able to figure out Magix's mixer to bounce an entire composition to a WAV, I can simply use Sound Forge to record whatever the internal sound device is cranking.Gold Wave (shareware) or Audacity (Free/shareare versions) also work for desktop recording in this fashion.

When I go to the CP sound controls for the sound device in the Vista NewBox, all I get is a volume slider for the speakers, and another for the microphone if I hunt around a little. That's it.

I don't know anything about the 945GM chipset and T2060 Intel Dual-Core processors, except that they are entry-level, so perhaps the onboard sound device is much more rudimentary than I had on the HP. But even my 2001 vintage clunker Celeron laptop has a full suite of audio controls available in control panel and recording across the desktop is routine.

Plus, there is the sometimes effective performance of Magix 10, a 2-yr.-old ap, still in the sub-$100 range. BOTH of these applications were producing superb, beautiful virtual instrument and synth sounds while running under XP, and the fact that Magix works at all, leads me to believe that these are driver issues. Cakewalk helped me get my copy reauthorized, then noted that the ap was not designed for Vista, and that an upgrade/new product for Vista was likely in the works; not a freebee, however.

Yep.

Also, I was too hasty in pronouncing Corel healthy. Photopaint's tools work, but the many aplets for tone curve, contrast and other processing and effects do not appear when invoked, so add Corel Photopaint 10 to the list of aps with major functional deficiencies under Vista.

In preparation for extracting the original hard drive from its current external enclosure and reinstalling it in the failed HP for return & repairs, I've been doing a lot of data backups to external hard drive and/or CD and DVD. For the most part, Explorer's performance has been adequate in this process, although I noticed that some files ended up where I didn't think I'd put them. And Explorer had a couple APCRASHes while I was doing all this. Also worth watching for is the default DVD burning format. If you burn a DVD as a giant floppy - which leaves the session open for adding subsequent data - it's going to crawl. I inadvertantly burnt my first DVD on that setting, and when the progress bar jumped to six hours plus remaining, I was a bit disgruntled. In the end, however, it only took maybe 20 -25 minutes - still much longer than the 6-8 minutes required if you burn/close in one fell swoop.

I haven't tried much beyond what I've recounted here, but I may stil try to give Max a shakedown on this box and see if/how it runs. Since I've had Max, I've been wanting a dual-processor workstation, but the price points were always unreasonably high because of low volume. Max is multi-threaded, so I'm eager to see how rendering times with the dual-core Intel would compare with my HP and its Athlon 3400, once I get it back from the shop. If I end up with both laptops, I'll come back and post some comparative rendering times data.

S