For audio, I downloaded the driver directly from the Realtek website. All the drivers you need, however, are linked from this page: NotebookReview.com – Asus Vista 32/64 Drivers

Surprisingly, the ATK driver, OSD and hotkey utilities work nicely. They’re certainly fancier than the old XP version that came with the Z71 from the factory.

When I bought this notebook I specced it up to the max, so it’s not surprising that it runs Vista reasonably well. Keeping in mind that this is a fresh rebuild, I’m now logged on and looking at the desktop (and able to click the Start menu) only 1 minute after powering up.

I’m a little suspicious that something fishy is going on with my CPU clock  speed. I’ve set Power4Gear (and Vista’s power management before that) to use maximum CPU speed, and it sits at 1600MHz, even though it’s a 2100MHz CPU. I’ve tried my registered version of Notebook Hardware Control, but that had some bugs.

This gives me a Vista performance score of 3.4, with the limiting factor being the CPU. It’s still a decent score, but I believe it should be higher.