I'm a Windows person, and I don't want to switch away from XP. When I recently built a new PC with 4 GB of RAM I had to switch to 64-bit and I had a bit of unpl

I'm a Windows person, and I don't want to switch away from XP. When I recently built a new PC with 4 GB of RAM I had to switch to 64-bit and I had a bit of unpleasant experience with it. Windows XP 64-bit is built upon the codebase of Windows Server 2003 (Vista is Windows Server 2008) and it shows. 1. Some hardware may not have drivers for the OS. While on 32-bit system you can connect any device form a decade ago and it will possibly work (with drivers that were also written a decade ago), with 64-bit there's additional possibility of breakage. My printer, HP LaserJet 1015, is manufactured in 2004, but alas, it doesn't have drivers for XP 64-bit. I can get away with installing un-working driver and substituting the driver with LaserJet III's which kinda works. HP's support can recommend nothing better too. 2. Same with system software; something might break too, most likely if it is system-related. I have used SwitchIt, a keyboard layout switcher, for a long time. Its last version is from 1996, but it worked fine for me. In 64-bit, it doesn't. (there's a beta version now which kinda works, but what if there wasn't one?) 3. Not 64-bit related, but Windows related one. I came to like Hibernate feature in Windows XP, but it stopped working for RAM >= 4GB. It's a known issue: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888575 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888575 I guess, the person who wrote it left long ago and they can't figure out how to add support for files>4GB, or addressing RAM>4GB at boot time. Seems like other OS folks don't have this problem.