Vista - 32 bit or 64 bit ???

[Kumagoro]

Is the time right to switch to a 64 bit version of windows?

What are the pitfalls I should be aware of in particular and roughly how long will they last?

What benefits will I be getting right now and in he future say one or two years.

[kalniel]

The pitfalls at the moment are mostly down to drivers from third parties. Sometimes they don't exist, sometimes they're not optimised.

Perversely, benefits right now include driver signing - that means that that what drivers you do have must be digitally certified. This is partly to blame for the lack of drivers for somethings, but it also means that when the drivers do come out they should be very stable ones, so you're whole system is more stable/secure.

Other current benefits include the ability for windows processes to access more than 2.3gb or so of ram at once, so whether that's a benefit to you or not depends how much ram you have and whether you have any applications that will use it - they do exist.

In the future more applications will be natively writing in 64bit which gives them access to more instructions in the CPU, allowing them to do some things quicker.