The Watering Hole

I'm putting together the I.T. list and budget for our company and wanted to get some opinions.  All of my older PC's and our box-o-rocks laptops currently run Windows XP Pro, when we get new machines, is there any reason we shouldn't go with Windows 7 as the operating system?

The main software that will be used includes the following:
- MS Office Suite (primarily Excel)
- Adobe Creative Suite (primarily PhotoShop and Acrobat)
- AutoCAD
- Solidworks
- MS Project (or similar)
- PLC software (probably Seimans)
- SCADA software (probably Wonderware)

At the moment I don't think I'll need to install Visual Studio 2008 or any databases, but I might need to in the future.

Feel free to comment on other aspects like 64-bit or how many processors the hardware should have.  I'm just starting my investigating pending two orders we're expecting in the next week or two.  Even preferred laptop brands would be appreciated (note that we will NOT be using Apple, these are simply not used in our industry and we have to keep the costs down).

Thanks for the opinions.  :)

Win7 all the way.  It allows you to run an app as if it is running on any previous Windows OS.  Plus it just works smarter than previous Windows.  64-bit if you want to stick 8 gigs of RAM in the system.  You don't need 64-bit for anything, really, but it works just fine.

Cool - thanks.  Having to stay within a budget, if we don't need 64-bit for anything (I was thinking it might be useful for the CAD stuff), then 32-bit is just fine. :)

Vista was like a rebirth of ME/98/95
Hopefully it is dead now.

and the NT family continue - till windows is dead :)

When I was doing that contract with Intel I got to go back into their secret "vault" workrooms.  The first day I was escorted in there's some guy cussing out Vista - lol!
I found out they ONLY use Vista to test the motherboards (because they have to).  The rest of the place is running Windows XP Pro.