While most businesses are prudently waiting for the first service pack before rolling out Windows Vista to the desktop, the move to the 64bit version is proving to be more of a challenge for some software vendors.

One of the main reasons for upgrading to the 64bit version is more memory. Eighteen months ago 1Gb of RAM was a lot, but with Vista consuming even more than XP, and applications pushing up their memory requirements with each version, it won’t be long before the 3.2GB effective limit of Vista 32bit is simply not enough.

While that ought to be a lot of memory, load up a couple of standard desktop applications and you soon find yourself back into disk paging territory. If you are in a specialist field, such as digital imaging, then 3.2GB is also not that much. A couple of years ago, with digital cameras struggling to hit 6 megapixels and slow broadband links acting as a brake on productivity, we were able to manage perfectly well.

Today, high-resolution images manipulated in Photoshop can consume a large chunk of your available memory. With memory prices so low, the quickest way to boost performance is to add more RAM, but the limitation is now the hardware ­ not the cost of the extra memory.

The drivers for hardware, particularly the more esoteric devices, are finally starting to appear; scandalously late but at least they are arriving.

Why is it then that one large IT company, EMC Insignia, still hasn’t ported its Retrospect backup solution to Vista 64bit? Retrospect has always provided an expensive but good solution for the type of user who considers a backup absolutely essential and who is prepared to pay a lot of money over the years for each upgrade, relying on Retrospect as the ultimate safeguard.

Have you tried to run Retrospect on Vista 64bit? Well, you can’t. It isn’t certified and it throws up a number of errors. But most firms aren’t keen on running backup software that has errors. Vista 64bit was hardly a secret, so why hasn’t EMC Insignia updated the product?

I expect the problem is going to be more widespread because drivers have to be signed before they can be installed. For 32bit versions, Microsoft will allow unsigned drivers and some legacy drivers to be installed. For 64bit versions, the certification process is quite rigorous to make sure that dodgy drivers aren’t installed, thereby compromising stability.

If software vendors expect users to pay for support, then they need to deliver the goods, and that includes upgrades. If they don’t, then users will go elsewhere.