vista 64 is fine. the problem with it is that they are shipping it with machines that have a single gig of ram and Vista has a bunch of annoying safety features and about 30 services running by default that the average user doesnt need (FFS UPNP? Smart Cards? :rolleyes:).

drivers for mainstream hardware are no longer a problem since vista64 is officially supported by pretty much any hardware vendor whose hardware is worth buying.

DDR2 is dirt cheap right now (forget DDR3 if budget is a concern). you can build an 8 gig DDR2 quad core intel right now very cheaply, and if you spend a few hours tweaking vista to get rid of all its annoying features and services it becomes a very fast and stable OS.

pro level apps that have 64-bit support built in fly on it, and you only really see the true benefit of multitasking on something like a quad core if you have enough RAM so that its not constantly swapping things in and out of memory/pagefile.