Latest and greatest is fine. If it works. HP Support needs to
support it for retail customers as do other vendors. At the
moment, I think that you void the warranty if you run Windows
64 with HP. Though with HP, if you sneeze on it, you void your
warranty. The HP support guys have been helpful to me though
they are under no obligation to provide support. But hey, they
like the excuse to play with new toys too.
Lets say you're a developer and you run VS2003 on your current
hot P4 system and you want to go to Windows 64 and move your
VS2003 Pro kit (which you spent a small fortune on) to your
new machine.
Well, it won't install (there's a thread on this at the Microsoft
Newsgroup). So what do you do? Well, you could install Whidbey
but it's still Beta and there are restrictions on distribution
of binaries. I posted a solution where you can install it on the
Windows XP (32-bit) side of a dual boot system. But you'd have
to setup for dual boot. The problem is with VS2003 so there's
not a lot Microsoft can do. And based on previous history, I
don't think that they'd make your life easier so that they
could sell you a copy of VS2005 when it ships.
Now I'm sure that there are plenty of other 32-bit applications
in the same boat and customers will have to decide if they
can live without some of their old applications. Or if they
want to go through the trouble of setting up dual boot.
Now the computer illiterate guy that wants the latest and
greatest might not want to go through the effort of dual
boot or experiment with their old version of Quicken or
other software will install or run on Windows 64.
A successful product launch will need a lot of resources from
Microsoft. They have the resources and they stand to profit.
Question is: are they going to do it? You also have the issue
of drivers and this situation has improved a lot over the
last six months but it's still not perfect. There's also the
issue of Antivirus and Firewalls. You typically need the
corporate version of antivirus products or they don't have
the active scanning enabled. One real biggie, Zone Alarm hasn't
been ported yet. Yeah, you have the crappy Microsoft default Firewall but a lot of people would like a little more.
I see people pulling their hair out trying to install
Windows 64 on the newgroup. They eventually get help but it's
not always a piece of cake. If you have the wrong hardware,
sometimes it's very hard.
For me, it was fairly easy but I'm in the business.
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