GA7VAXP-A Ultra, Realtek 8139 and Vista

I hope this information is of use to someone.

I installed Vista Home Ultimate on an old GA7VAXP-A Ultra, using a 333
Athlon XP 2600 (not Barton).

These are the performance scores: cpu 3.5

RAM is 1 Gb PC2700 (2x512Mb): ram score 4.1

HDD is IBM ATA-100 123Gb: hdd score 5.1

Graphics scores with nVidia 5200 AGP - both 2
with nVidia 5600 - 3.2 and 3.0

Clearly not a gaming machine, but very acceptable for MS Office and
internet, even with AGP nVidia 5200.

All the standard things such as sound and USB installed without needing to
download anything from the web.
I never installed RAID, so in fact this board was a waste of money
originally.

The one problem I encountered is that Vista identified the onboard network
as Realtek 8139. This worked fine
from initial install through connecting to an ADSL router and the web until
reboot whereupon it refused to
connect. I then tried various add-on cards (coincidentally TrendNet and
Genius RTL 8139 chipset!) and these
displayed the same symptoms. Bizarrely, on first install, they work, after a
single reboot they don't. I imagine that
RTL 8139 is not fully compatible with Vista. The workaround has been to use
a USB wireless network adaptor
or a different chipset network card. The onboard network displayed the issue
under Windows XP too, but
responded perfectly with a RTL 8139 PCI network card.

EB