Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Golfbum]

In working with OEMs it's been my experience that they are extremely reluctant to sell a mainstream box with a future "feature" that they personally haven't validated.

When MSFT has a Win64 release candidate they will no doubt have a cattle call for boxes from OEMs that they can validate against as well as have the OEMs do their own validation. That means all manner of software (drivers and applications) that MSFT and the OEMs have in their suites will have to be tested against the actual hardware expected to ship with the OS.

Most OEMs won't make any claims about previously shipped boxes being capable of running the the "64bit OS" since they don't want to have to deal with driver updates and version updates of various pieces of software that the users will have already installed.

What does this mean? It means that basically no major OEM will claim that the mainstream desktop machine they're shipping today will run Win64 for fear of having to deal with all the expensive aggravation.

For me that means no buying "64bits" until it's shipping on OEM boxes in volume. And buying a machine in expectation that it will run Win64 before then is a nonstarter. I suspect that's the case for most folks as well.

The fact that some here are early adopters doesn't change that fact.

gb