WinXP x64: it's not yet ready.

After much talk, I finally got around to building a new desktop system. I was overdue for an upgrade and this time, I went all out (well, almost). It's a dual Opteron system. With these nice new 64-bit CPUs, I thought I'd give WinXP x64 a try.

MS touts the advantages of 64-bit and how it's faster, supports more RAM and still lets you run all the same 32-bit apps. Those are all true, but there's one major problem that they're not talking about: drivers! On a 64-bit OS, all the drivers need to be 64-bit too. What's that mean? It means that you can't use the same driver that you downloaded for your Whiz-Bing 2000, you have to go back to Acme's web site and see if they have a 64-bit version of their driver. Oh, Acme doesn't make the Whiz-Bing 2000 anymore so they don't care about updating the driver.

In the two hours that I ran WinXP x64, here's the problems I found:

• No Lexmark Printer/Scanner drivers (here's 32 pages of missing printer drivers)
• No drivers for my Creative SB 16 PCI (yes, I use two sound cards)
• No TweakUI for x64 (the Itanium version doesn't work)
• No Daemon tools
• No Sony Cybershot drivers

That was enough to put me off. I went back to the regular WinXP. In theory, it's not quite as fast as the x64 version would be, but it actually works. With regular XP, it also limits me to 4GB of RAM... guess I'll have to make due :)

I'm sure they'll get there soon, but vendors are going to have to start making x64 drivers before it catches on. Who knows, maybe XP x64 won't ever get major support... we may just have to wait for Longhorn (ETA: August '06).