x64: It's Lonely Out Here (But I Feel Powerful)

No TV. Latest casualty: DVICO FusionHD DVB-T card. No XP64 drivers now (and not for a while, at least). So I'm taking it out and lending it to a friend indefinitely. I built a (32 bit) Media Center PC the other week, so it's not a total loss, I can still watch recorded shows...

There seems to be a good amount of gaming community buzz around AMD64 systems and WinXP x64, but the driver situation is reminiscent of the Windows 2000 situation - few drivers, little perceived market penetration to date, and little to be gained by the migration for your average gamer right now (eg, it's week one, give it a little time). I'm not average, I'm a superb gamer, thank you.

As an example: I was going to buy Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory ($AUD80) and Pandora Tomorrow ($AUD30) today, but backed away after vaguely remembering that I'd heard the copy protection scheme for CT used a 32 bit driver, so I can't run it. The demo runs really nicely, though - perhaps they'll release an x64-compatible patch...

I'm also missing PasteOff, and other silly little .Net utilities that I built with VS 2003, as there's no Framework installed yet. I could install .Net 2.0 Beta 1, but I'm convinced that the .Net Framework Beta 2 is due sometime soon, so I don't want to waste 30% of my precious 10 gig per month downloading and installing an earlier (say, CTP) build, only to have it superseded by the "real" beta with the go-live license on the day (and most likely, the hour) I succumb. I can live without it for another month. Or I could try rewriting it in "real man's" Java. :)

One other oddity: my tooltips are appearing behind the taskbar, unless I disable "Always on top" for it. Not sure if this is an Nvidia driver thing yet.

Back to the MCE for some late night TV...