Great point on some pieces of software that require drivers. I think there's some Cisco VPN software that many companies use that still didn't have a 64-bit version of the software available quite a while after Vista shipped.

Antivirus and cd burning applications are other things that can require drivers. I'm not aware of any of those that don't have a 64-bit version available by now though.

HP's page on which devices are compatible with Vista is here.

That's generally good advice, but you also need to think about how long you keep a PC. Many PC's shipping in stores today are configured with 6+GB of RAM. A year from now, that may be a lot more common. If you think you'll be doing a lot of video/photo editing on the machine, you'll want a lot of RAM.

Nothing a normal user has really needs > 4GB of RAM today, but that could change in another year as more and more 64-bit systems hit the shelf. Then again, the folks that predict stuff like this have been saying that same thing for 5+ years now You cannot upgrade from a 32-bit OS to a 64-bit OS.

Not really true anymore. You can check with your peripheral vendors. If they haven't released 64-bit drivers by now, they most likely never will. But if they have a Certified for Windows Vista logo, then that means they do have 64-bit drivers.

If printers are the biggest obstacle, you should take a look at how cheap consumer level printers are these days. They don't cost too much more than the ink itself That's probably not true for business-class hardware though.



http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/
I don't know how much info is there these days, but you can go there to see if your device is listed as 64-bit compatible or not.