Well, almost everything. Although motherboard manuals have come a long way since the days of the CD-ROM-only versions that had you scratching your head about how you were going to look at a manual that could only be viewed on a computer that wasn’t actually running at the time, ASUS left two important installation details out of their otherwise excellent manual:

1. If you’re trying to install the original version of Windows XP (no service packs included) onto a SATA drive, you’ll end up with an ugly, unexplainable STOP error in the middle of the installation. As it turns out, Windows XP doesn’t have the drivers to handle a SATA drive until Service Pack 2, so if you have an earlier version, you’ll need to create a floppy disk with the SATA controller driver on it and tell Windows about the disk at the start of the installation by pressing F6. ASUS could have saved me several hours of hassle by letting me know about this issue in the manual.
   
   
2. Because they really did think of almost everything, ASUS actually includes the drivers for the SATA controller – and a program to make a floppy disk called makedisk – on the drivers CD. However, they neglected to mention in the manual that you can access makedisk by booting the computer from the drivers CD; I only discovered this feature after I had already secured a later version of Windows XP.