Sgolds, let me just say that I think you underestimate the driver support necessary to push volume sales of 64-bit Windows before Longhorn. It's not up to Microsoft to tell people what to purchase with their PCs. A large percentage of users recycle their old video cards, sound cards, optical drives, etc for use with newer motherboards and CPUs. There is also a large amount of esoteric hardware that you probably take for granted, and you'd miss it if there were no Windows support. ACPI, for example. Just take a look at your device manager, and you'll find the list of drivers that will need to be ported. This includes video/audio codecs, NIC support, USB, etc. Microsoft is probably putting a lot of work into supporting the basics, but like Windows 2k, you will probably end up with a limited configuration support. You will have generic drivers for most of your hardware, which will limit performance. A good storage driver can mean the difference of 10-15% of performance in disk intensive tasks. Then there are the hundreds of third parties out there. Sure, ATI and nVidia will be making 64-bit drivers, but the video card is not the only part of your system. This issue comes up every time there is a new version of Windows or a new driver model to follow. Since 64-bit Windows is not a major Microsoft release (as was Windows XP or what will be Longhorn), I do not expect the support to be comprehensive.
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