In February, I purchased from Newegg the Windows RC 1 Vista Ultimate evaluation DVD which offers the new operating system on a trial basis, fully active with downloads and online support through May of this year. With previous versions of Windows (Windows 2000, XP Professional, XP MCE, and XP Home Edition) I have been unable, regardless of driver update, rollback, uninstall/reinstall, or registry edit proceedures to simultaniously enable DMA for both of my IDE drives. Following the clean install of Vista, DMA was default-enabled for both drives and remains enabled throughout six weeks of use. A dual-boot with XP Pro and the Vista RC 1 install on a second hard drive yielded the same result; DMA enabled on both drives in the Vista partition, DMA enabled on only the master drive with XP. As of yesterday, I have installed the RC 1 five times on as many hard drives, and every time the DMA enabling problem experienced with Win 2000/Win XP does not exist with Vista. On thursday (04-05) I called Microsoft technical support regarding this difference, but everyone I spoke with was unable to unequivocally attribute this difference to any intended design change, nor could they guarantee the same result with a standard retail or OEM purchase/install of any version of Vista. There are some things I do not like about Vista, but I have to date experienced none of the problems such as poor driver support reported by others in various forums. At this time, there is a decidedly limited selection of free software (antivirus, antispyware, and firewall) available for Vista, but that will not be true for much longer. I do not and never have worked for Microsoft and until 04-06 have never contacted them for any reason. I continue to use XP and see no particular advantage to switching to Vista other than the DMA issue. Please be aware that I am not trying to sell anyone on buying Vista; the only purpose of this post is to relate my experience and to make others experiencing the frustrating DMA problem in XP aware of what I have discovered. The RC 1 evaluation disc (32 bit only, but I think a 64 bit version is also available) can be purchased from Newegg for less than $7.00 plus s&h. If nothing else, it will give the user a real world and fairly extended experience with the new operating system without having to spend big dollars.