I am thinking about investing a lot of money into a 32-bit workstation, but I am concerned about the shift in technology to 64 bit processors. Should I wait and purchase a 64-bit system when there is a functioning 64-bit Windows operating system and animation packages bring out their 64-bit animation software?
64-bit processing will take a while to catch on. There *is* a version of XP that is 64 bit, but a vast vast majority of software is still not compiled for a 64 bit processor, so everything runs in emulated 32 bit.
You're not going to see a huge performance decrease if you just buy a 64 bit processor computer now, run it in 32 bit mode, then switch when the software picks up speed and you can get a 64 bit os....