64Bit vs. Duo Core advice please

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to sidetrack this forum in any way, I'm a diehard Dell and Pentium laptop guy myself, promise.

Here's my delima though. I have niece who is in a very poor family and she's getting ready to graduate high School this year. She's been an outstanding student with bench mark grades and earned a grant into med school because of all her hard work and dedication.

We want to get her a new laptop for college as a graduation present and while reseaching my own new laptop I ran across a great report on durability for a specific laptop on tomshardware.com known as the Twinhead Durabook. I'm sold on the new intel Duo's for myself, but after reading this report was kind of attracted to this twinhead durabook for a clumsey college environment where drops and spills are likely.

http://usa.twinhead.com/PRO/N14RA/

I'm pretty much sold on as far as durability this must be the idea notebook for a college student. What I'm not so sure about though and can't seem to find any apples to apples comparasins on is how does the AMD Turion 64 bit processor stand up to the Intel Duo processor?

I'ver never used a 64bit system before, the price has always before been out of touch for me but with a 1600 FSB I can't help but think the thing must blow away even the new Duo systems when it comes to system processing? It's also within the budget we want to spend.

So does anyone here happen to know, is the 64 bit system better than the 32bit Duo, and other than the 64bit Windows XP OS needed to run on it, can you run normal windows apps on the 64bit system?

 

Yes you can run 32 bit apps on 64 bit systems.

You may want to fill out the fAQ for them, it'd help. Just 64 bit vs Core Duo doesn't really tell us much. It all really depends on what you're doing with the computer as well.

 

I thank you for answering the part about the 32bit apps, that in itself was helpful info I was seeking. As far as the rest I really don't know. I've never been a med student myself and I'm not sure what they run or need to run. I know when you go to the doctors office now he can pull up all your tests like X Rays and this type of gram and that type of gram on his laptop in the little room with the paper bed sheets. It seems to me like the medical field is really going to alot of graphic intensive 3D type stuff this day in age?

Like I said, I'm a Pentium guy myself and have used Dual Processor Mother Boards that rocked, but never anything 64bit. I know the graphics end of things will be important for her, but was just curious about the Processor end and if the 64 bit processor was as good or better than the new Duo then the durability of the overall system would be a sell for what I think she needs. I don't want to sacrafice the better processing power just for the durability though.

 

The only 64 bit notebook CPU out right now is the Turion 64, which is worse than the Core Duo in performance clock for clock.

The Turion X2s will be out soon enough, sometime next month notebooks should be popping up featuring them. The Turion X2 is both Dual Core and 64-Bit, so you may want to wait for that.