An improvement on the onboard audio, and FLAC files run more smoothly when lots of other apps are doing their thing. But the initial CD driver/control-panel installation is painfully slow, brain-dead, and finally crashed Vista completely. Eventually I hard-booted. I suggest MS Vista users instead install the unofficial Daniel_K Vista drivers with this card, rather than the CD drivers. These are very well put together, and his drivers have a number of advantages - including enabling a hardware MIDI synthesizer on the card with SoundFont banks.