Has anyone taken the Windows Xp 64 plunge?

I wouldn't take the plunge if you aren't willing to play with some bugs. The 64-bit system is just now getting some development behind it.

Wait.

I'd ghost your hard drive(s) if you really wanted to try it out. That way if it doesn't work out good, you can always start back from where you left off.

I personally will be going 64, but probably not for another year.

I used the betas as MS released them, and for all purposes, it pretty much the same thing. You get a lot more virtual memory and in theory, isn't vulnerable to most of the viruses/trojans out there since they're 32-bit (its a bit dicey, because it does have the 32-bit backward compatibility, but I haven't heard on how critical it is to the system operation). I also found that it loaded much faster than 32-bit XP, but that could've been affected by the fact I didn't have as many programs installed.

The only real problems are that there were no printer/scanner drivers because they re-wrote the way they worked, and the major companies at the time didn't want to bother until the OS was ready for rollout. I believe they have some out now, but you may want to check on that. The video card manufacturers (ATI and Nvidia) had beta drivers out, don't know if they are still in beta or not. (The reason I so vague is that I had XP-64 but had screwed up the tweaking of it, and then my floppy drive went kaput, and I need the FD to install drivers at installation for my setup).

And if you have enough space you can partition your hard drive into to separate drives and then install XP-64 onto it. It will also install a startup menu whenever you turn on your computer that will ask if you want to load XP or XP-64. That way, if you like 64 you can transfer over pretty much everything from 32-bit and then delete that partition, or if you don't like it you can get rid of 64-bit and then keep the 32-bit OS, or as most people do, keep both and work with XP-64 unless you encounter compatibility problems.