Win7 will have a big impact over Vista. It doesn't need as much RAM. For example, Win7 will run on Netbooks...forget doing that with Vista.

>I've heard and read things that go either way - but generally what I hear is that the OS is noticably faster when running 64Bit given an equal amount of RAM.
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>My only experience with 64Bit Windows is with Server2003 64Bit running SQL2005 64Bit. In a couple of these cases, I took existing server hardware running 32Bit windows and SQL and rebuilt using 64Bit Windows and SQL - in those cases the effect was very apparent - near doubling of overall database speed (I had to do benchmarks using our database on both and compare them for mgmt). We had issues getting A/V and backup software that would work on the 64Bit O/S, but that was it.
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>One way or another I guess it isn't going to happen on my laptop. I do have 2GB RAM (max on this unit) which is supposed to be sufficient, but I have no idea if I could get everything working.