I forgot about being able to partition (sorry, old school) and run different OS versions on the machine. The person already posted that the laptop is sold (so surprise there), so the immediate need for an answer isn't there, but will keep in mind as I go shopping.
Karen In a message dated 3/28/2012 6:28:04 AM Central Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: > I would not fret about 32 or 64 bit, I have been 64 bit for years now > with no issues. Almost all vendors now have a 64 bit version of a driver or > program, including Adobe who finally caved and released the 64 bit Flash. > The key is to get a machine with lots of Memory and Hard Drive space. With > the extra hard drive space you can then get VMWare and load up as many > different O/S versions as you want. > > With VMware Workstation you can have any OS you want at your fingertips. > I have all the Windows O/S versions loaded on my machine all the way back > to Win98, although I skipped Win ME for obvious reasons. I even use it to > match the different environments and settings of locations that I support. > >

