>It'll use the entire 4 Gig RAM. Performance should be better.

It (as well as Vista) use 4 gig of RAM in 32 bit just the same. XP can't use more than 3 gigs in 32 bit, but Vista already supports 4 gig. Only in 64 bit you have to deduct a significant amount of the memory used for the 64 bit pointers - most apps run 20-30% more memory on 64 bit...

I really question the logic in going with 64 bit given that there continue to be lots of driver incompatibilities especially with any older hardware as well as the hassles of having mixed and duplicated setups on your machines for program files certain windwos files and folders.

Until the time comes where there is more software actually takes advantage of 64 bit operation (which is minimal for desktop) I can't justfify the additional hassles or overhead for 64 bit.Plus repeated performance tests have shown that there's no performance gain in overall user application usage by using 64 bit OS (for Vista at least). This may change over the years but as of right now I wouldn't expect a change for release of Win7.

64 bit for servers makes perfect sense to me since many server apps (like IIS and ASP.NET including my own code) are optimized for it, but for desktop that same incentive is near nil.

+++ Rick ---