I went ahead and repartitioned, formatted, and started over. I am now primarily using Vista 64bit at home. I have a Windows XP partition for the things that will not run on Vista, and I have 50GB reserved for FreeBSD once -CURRENT gets to a point where it will boot on my machine and is stable (for now, I have my 7-STABLE partition on my laptop when I need it).

The biggest thing I noticed? Disk IO speeds. On XP and Vista 32, my SATAII drives achieve an upper bound of just over 50MB/s read and write speeds. With Vista64 I get just under 80MB/s (for testing, I copied a Solaris 10 x86 ISO from drive to drive in each (using the same starting and end point for each of course)). And of course, Vista64 actually uses all 4GB of RAM.

I wish FreeBSD didn't lock up playing in USB land booting an install disc, as I'd love to benchmark it on my machine. It handily outperforms Vista32 on the laptop, and I'm curious how it would stand against Vista64 on my desktop.

Why am I still at work? Because some idiot fucking subcontractor emailed us something they shouldn't have, and I'll be here for another couple of hours cleaning this shit up. Just how I wanted to start my weekend.