Analysis: 64-bit Driver Support Still A Mixed Bag...

[IGBT]

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In the short term, the muddled driver environment will favor PC OEMs, which at least have had a chance to talk to their suppliers and assemble a PC from parts with 64-bit support. Users accustomed to building their own PCs, however, will have to check each component and ensure it will be supported by the new operating system.

Not surprisingly, all of Microsoft's mice and keyboards will be supported with the new 64-bit drivers, Sullivan said. Exceptions may be more common in "specialty products" and devices like joysticks, he said. Likewise, the "majority" of Creative Technology's keyboards and mice also have 64-bit driver support, according to spokeswoman Amy Stojsavljevic, along with the company's MuVo line of flash players and the Zen Portable Media Center.


....According to Greg Sullivan, lead product manager for Microsoft's Windows team, 16,000 devices will support the Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, scheduled to be released Monday. A number of PC component manufacturers began publishing their drivers earlier this month.

 

[JMWarren]

How big of an issues is this really? I've got an old IBM webcam which certianlly won't have x64 drivers. Hell the drivers aren't even Windows XP certified. So i'm guessing I'll never have support for this if i upgrade to XP64?

Mike

 

[CalvinHobbs]

i'm not going the 64bit way as far i'm concerned...no support for modem so not interesting for me for the time being

 

[IGBT]

..I'll wait till xp64 or LongHorn is well established then take a look at it. No need to be the first..or 2nd for that matter.

 

[Ze Mad Doktor]

I've been running x64 RC2 for about a month. I really have had no problems except for a couple minor things. Video files of any sort won't play with the drivers I have now for my 5200 however they play fine with the official NVIDIA drivers. The only other problem is that Canon has no drivers for my i560. It seems as if all printer manufacturers don't have 64bit drivers which doesn't really surprise me. The printer business is a shiesty one indeed and I would expect their long term support for future OSs to reflect that. All this just means I have to boot to 2000 to print and/or watch vids neither of which I do that often.

All my games run fine under x64 as does everything else I have tried to run so once I get those two things worked out I will be going dual boot (Fedora/x64 instead of Fedora/x64/2000 now) I am actually relatively impressed with the low number of problems I have had.