What are the Benifits of X64

XP64 itself is already faster, menus loads faster etc. All 64bit softwares are faster than 32bit although there arent so many native 64bit yet. I use XP32 and XP64 dualboot and XP64 just kicks ass. Almost every 32BIT game and program also works in XP64.

PS. HalfLife 2 64bit has just been released...

I run XP x64 as my main OS on my Ferrari 4005. I've been pretty happy with it, mostly because we are lucky enough that Acer released all the needed 64 bit drivers. Stability wise, I think the machine crashed a couple times in 6 months and it must have been the hardware, since I haven't seen a Windows' blue screen of death yet.

As a replacement for the regular XP, most of the 32 bit apps work (Firefox, Thunderbird, Nero, OpenOffice, iTunes -not the CD burning feature though- and games: Quake4, Call Of Duty 2, Civ IV), the system itself feels a bit more responsible and 64 bit apps are a bit more efficient. There aren't many 64 bit app out there yet though The only one I use all the time is 7-Zip, a free Zip/7z/Gzip/BZip2/... compressor tool. There is a sizeable speed difference between the 32 bit and 64 bit versions in my machine, verificable by the benchmark it features. neat

Be warned that a 64 bit system will use more memory, because the code instructions and data in programs are bigger. I read somewhere a 64 bit process use roughly 15% more memory. Not a big deal on these 1GB RAM days though.

By the way, some shitty installers don't really like this Windows version (weirdly, XP x64 is a derivative of Windows 2003 x64). By example, it took Google Earth a couple of updates to catch up and install fine, while it is still a 32 bit app

I would not say that the OS is unstable. Its simply that there are limited Drivers out there still. Everybody is gearing up for Vista and xp64 will probably never develope much attention however hopefully most drivers that are made for vista will work on xp64 dunno on that. XP64 was built on the 2003 server core which from all I have heard way supperior to XP32.

I've been running xp64 on my machine most of the time i have owned my FR4005 laptop. It works great. Although It would be nice if acer or ATI would keep drivers updated more frequently.

There are a fiew minor hitches with x64 so if your not a diehard computer geek that can't wait for x64 to be mainstream then don't worry about it. Just keep pluging along with 32 bit crap LOL J/K I remember when we went from 16 bit to 32 bit... man did we have some crapy machines back then... And we thought they were awesome too LOL....