Double check the asus support site again. When you were looking for BIOS, I think you might have been looking at BIOS for a different board. The latest is 1004 which came out on 1/26. I installed the 1004 before installing Vista. Installed from USB thumb drive using the Asus ez-flash built into the bios. Had some trouble getting the ez-flash utility to see the .rom file - tried multiple usb ports and ctrl-alt-deletes to no avail. Finally got it to read the thumb drive from a front usb port by completely powering down the PC, inserting the drive, then powering back up. Flashing didn't tell me when it was done. Screen just kind of went blank and sat there. I waited a few minutes out of paranoia, then finally rebooted manually. voila! bios is now at 1004.
I installed Vista Ultimate on a new P5B Deluxe over the weekend. I did NOT need or have any other drivers other than what's on the Vista DVD. All drivers including ACPI, JMicron, NIC, etc. came from the Vista DVD.
Installed it on a SATA drive, by booting the Vista DVD from a DVD drive plugged into the jmicron controller. The installer took a while to get started (gave me a pretty back ground and a mouse cursor and that's it for about 2 minutes then it finally kicked in. Installation seemed a little slow at first (maybe because DVD reader was in PIO mode), then seemed to speed up. At end of installation, the screen went completely blank with no prior warning and stayed that way for about a minute. Uh oh! Finally, it rebooted by itself and Vista came right up. I'd say it only took 25-30 minutes total.
After getting Vista on, I added two more SATA drives to act as RAID1 storage. When I went into the BIOS, I realized I had set "SATA configuration" for 'AHCI' but it needed to be 'RAID'. I changed it, but when I rebooted Vista, it blue screened on me. Tried a few other things, then gave up and just re-installed Vista a second time, this time with "RAID" properly selected "IDE Configuration".
I finally went back and added my other two SATA drives, then went into the Intel Matrix manager (ctrl-i on during BIOS POST ) to set up a RAID1. When I next went into Vista, it saw the raid right away. No problem so far with the RAID (there have been numerous posts about RAID issues regarding Vista versus P965/ICHR8). I did *not* install the Intel Matrix manager PC software; I'm only using the BIOS-version of the manager; perhaps that has something to do my success?
There have also been reported problems with DVD/CD drives getting stuck in PIO mode on the Jmicron controller. I checked under device manager and both my burners (Sony 710A's) are showing up under the IDE controller as Ultra DMA). But based on others' reports, I think you mileage may vary depending on what kind of drives you have. I'm using the JMicron controller that came on the Vista DVD.
Asus very recently released a new Vista JMicron and also ACPI drivers for the P5B deluxe. I tried installing, but both failed to install. I run the installers, they seem to start doing their thing and then just quit. Not sure what the deal is. So right now, Vista is using the drivers that came on the Vista DVD. As usual, the Asus support site doesn't say what's different in the drivers they just released, so I'm not sure what I'm missing (or how I'm benefitting) by not installing them.
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