Digital BW, The Print

I also made the switch to Vista 64 recently (last week, and running SP1 
pre-release). The advantage is largely around memory available to 
applications. Each 32-bit application can access up to a full 4GB on a 
64-bit OS, so 64-bit versions of common apps are not really necessary 
(yet) unless you are manipulating extremely large images. With 32-bit 
OSes (Vista 32 or XP), you are limited to a total of less than 3.3GB no 
matter how much memory you put in your system. If you have a 512MB 
Video Card, it's not unusual to be down around 2.7GB. The OS will then 
try to use a big chunk of that for caching and all the rest is shared 
by applications.

Now, several GB may sound like a lot, and for most apps it is, but 
PhotoShop and Lightroom like "contiguous" physical memory (I believe 
this is related to how they use the video card). With a 64-bit OS there 
is a much better chance that they will get what they ask for. I saw 
memory problems with printing in particular, so I'm hoping that with 
6GB - all available - this will be less of an issue. I'll keep my 
fingers crossed. The additional memory (Corsair XMS) cost me <$20/GB 
from newegg.

I have drivers for all of my hardware. Even my Huey works (1.0.5), 
Wacom Graphire, etc. Some older devices may not work, particularly 
printers and webcams as the effort to get them working on Vista (any 
flavor) is a lot harder anyway.

One (only?) app that gave me trouble was PS Elements 4.0. It worked 
fine when I had only 2GB in my Vista 64 system. When I went to 6GB, it 
got weird. The organizer window (all I use) was just not visible on 
screen. No idea where it went. I downloaded a trial of PSE 6.0 and that 
works fine for me - and it uses ACR 4.x. (I'm kicking myself because 
Costco had it on sale for $49 until Saturday and I didn't find out 
about the problem until Sunday night.)

BTW, my setup is 2x500GB SATA RAID1 for the OS, 2 partitions (dual boot 
Vista 32 & 64), 2x320GB SATA RAID0 for my data and scratch space, 500GB 
USB drive for backup. I duplicate my pictures in many ways because 
that's what really matters :). I have had drive failures so RAID1 is 
very useful to avoid a full OS reinstall. And I have use Vista's full 
system backup to restore the entire OS to new drives/partitions (unplug 
your data disks and deactivate any Adobe products FIRST!). If you use 
the same physical drives for scratch as the OS, you may get into 
performance issues if the OS starts to page but as noted, this should 
be minimal in a setup like this.

One word of caution - if you are installing Vista (not SP1), do so with 
less than 4GB to start.