I've been running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 RC since June.
It's been quite painless on the whole.
One wrinkle that I ran into was with some batchfiles which
launch applications in %ProgramFiles% (normally C:\Program Files).
Due to the magic WOW64 redirector, 32-bit applications
are actually installed into %ProgramFiles(x86)%—normally C:\Program Files (x86)—instead of %ProgramFiles%.
This is transparent to the 32-bit applications,
which think they're running in %ProgramFiles% (C:\Program Files).
However, the cmd.exe shell is 64-bit
(unless you make a special effort to run the 32-bit cmd.exe in SysWOW64),
so batchfiles see the 64-bit %ProgramFiles% which contains 64-bit applications.
Hence, a batchfile that launches an installed 32-bit application on Win64
must use %ProgramFiles(x86)%, not %ProgramFiles%.
It sounds trivial to have a batchfile detect
which flavor of %ProgramFiles% it should use,
but the parentheses in the environment variable name make it tricky to parse.
On earlier versions of Win64, the environment variable was called %ProgramFilesx86%.
Presumably they added the strange parentheses into the variable name
because the directory name always included them.
Here's a tiny batchfile that will launch the 32-bit DiffMerge
correctly on both Win64 and Win32 platforms.
@setlocal
@set _pf=%ProgramFiles%
@if not "[%ProgramFiles(x86)%]"=="[]" set _pf=%ProgramFiles(x86)%
@start "" /b "%_pf%\SourceGear\DiffMerge\DiffMerge.exe" %*
I long ago found that the safest way to test environment variables
whose values may include spaces, is to surround them with
both double quotes and square brackets.
I had about 60 apparently corrupted photos on a CompactFlash card the other evening.
It might have been due to Lightroom going berserk,
but it was more likely from my pulling the card reader out of the computer
without ejecting it first.
The photos wouldn't show up under Mac, Linux, or Windows.
I tried to chkdsk the card under Windows, which complained about a “raw” disk.
That led me to ZAR, the Zero Assumption Recovery toolkit.
The evaluation copy retrieved the photos very nicely.
Whew!