Windows XP Pro 64bit is definitely not ready for primetime. First off you’re not going to see much of an improvement unless you’re running a 64bit application. Right now there really isn’t much out there that take advantage of the benefits of 64bit. However you will be getting yourself into a world of hurt if you have a lot of accessories attached to your system, guaranteed! I found this out the hard way, helping a friend build his dream computer. He went for the best of everything, dual core Athlon 64bit 4200+ processor, 1 gigabyte of Corsair XPERT memory, Dual Nvidia 7800GTX graphics board in a SLI configuration. With this type of hardware you would think why not run Windows XP Pro 64bit to get everything you can out of the system. There is one resounding answer why not to, there is no driver support what so ever. Unless it is built into Microsoft’s build, you might as well just hang it up. He has the following peripherals attached to his system: HP Scanner, DYMO label printer, several HP printers he prints to on different floors and across a WAN, most important Alcohol 120% to keep images of all his game discs. We found that the scanner and label printer had no drivers. Alcohol 120% will not run under 64bit because it creates a virtual drive and needs a driver to create it. We made a phone call to Dymo to get a status on driver development and were basically told “We are not in the process of designing any drivers for 64bit Windows”. Umm, hello, can we have a reality check here. It seems the industry is in one of those which came first the chicken or the egg scenarios again. Developers do not want to take the time to develop drivers until they see OS adoption. Then you have the end users that will not adopt without drivers. Get your act together folks and just design and make drivers available for the products we shelled out our good hard earned dollars for. It’s not like we are talking about Mom and Pop companies, were talking huge corporations like HP that don’t even have any driver support for most of their products under 64bit Windows. My suggestion for now is just avoid Windows XP Pro 64bit like the plague unless you have not peripherals attached to your box. Do your homework first on all devices and software you will run under 64bit Windows or you will wind up throwing your system out the window in frustration.