WIndows Vista?

hi i have a toshiba satellite m60 and i hear that windows vista will be coming out next year. i also heard that you need to have a 64 MB something to run it well. i think centrino basedlaptops are 32 Mb something...does anyone know if ill still be able to run it?

 

Hmm...Do you mean 64bit/32 bit??

Check out the Vista Notebook Compatibility Guide thread it should clear your doubts about Vista. There most probably will be 32 as well as 64 bit versions of Vista. The most important issue would be the GPU. most of the other components can handle Vista but for the GUI to work as intended you"ll need a pretty robust card.

 

It will still run but without a DirectX 9 supported card you probably won't get all all the eye candy which may not be a bad thing. I had Vista running on my T42. With AeroGlass, the new GUI for Windows, titles bars are translucent meaning you can see through them which makes them hard to read or at least I thought so.

 

what does it mean to have a 64 bit or a 32 bit?? i have 800 dollars of poker winnings..and i could sell my current m60 and then get myself a 64 bit laptop. from my understanding however, only amd makes the 64 bit, not intel. i took an oath never to buy amd...but i guess intel will make one eventually. would it be worth it to get a new laptop? ive only had this one since august lol.

 

64 bit vs 32 bit refers to the capacities of the processors registers. Bigger is better, if other things such as operating systems are able to support 64 bit processing. Right now the vast majority are made for 32 bit processors, which is the only available processor except for AMD's. But anyway, think of your registers as being the closest memory to the processor and the hard drive as the farthest from the processor. The registers store either 32 or 64 bits of information. Once they need more information they go to the Level 1 cache, which is also on the processor, still extremely fast but slower than the registers, then the level 2 cache, also on the processor but farther away than the registers and level 1 cache. After the level 2 cache is the RAM, which is seperate from the processor and takes a lot longer to retrieve the data than either level 1 or 2 cache but is also much faster than having to go read from the hard drive. So when shopping for a computer, the more level 1 and 2 cache the better. Right now I think the maximum level 2 cache is 2MB, with the Celeron processors for example having only 128 or 256KB of level 2 cache vs the Pentium IV with 2 MB, this may not seem like a lot of difference, but at the speeds that the processor can access the cache vs the speeds it can access the hard drive, there will be a considerable difference in performance. So if they can tailor an operating system specifically for a 64 bit processor, I would think that it would be the next big jump in performance, that and faster hard drives especially in laptops. But I wouldn't wait to buy a new laptop until they take advantage and fully utilize the 64 bit processing, will probably be at least a year yet I would think.