Hi – I’m a novice wrt hatdware.
I’m looking at maybe purchasing an Acer laptop that is being sold at a good price because there are newer stocks coming into the store that’s selling it.
The CPU is this: Intel® Core™ 2 Duo P7370 (2.0GHz)
My question is: Are these CPUs 64 bit?
(I think so and so does the salesperson, but neither of us is sure).
Thanks
swerdna
Great: Then it’s worth my tracking the laptop model down on the Hardware Compat Lists.
The discount is like $AUD900
Thanks Geoff
As you likely know John, the 2 main areas to give serious thought are
Carl its an Acer TravelMate 7730 with these
Which from a Linux POV is good for video but for network it’s quite vague.
You probably have seen here: Linux on Acer Laptops & Notebook Computers
I didn’t see your model.
It’s not in the HCL. Though you may be able to track down it’s individual components (given time).
I suspect, given the specifications, it will be somewhat tricky. I couldn’t just see much on the Intel wireless either, but I only had a quick look. I have Intel but a seemingly common and very friendly type.
The wireless is shown on the Intel site as Linux compatible. Here’s a quote from their “Product Brief”:
Operating Systems: Microsoft Windows XP* 32/64-bit, Microsoft Windows Vista* 32/64-bit, Linux
Sop all I really need to worry about now would be the wired Ethernet and surely that wouldn’t be a problem in this day and age.
Of course, there are other functionalities that could be iffy, like Bluetooth and sound. But the Acer lappy I have currently, 6 yrs old, has shown no problems.
I guess it ships with Vista (And then probably a free upgrade to W7?)
Maybe give it a go. See if other respond;)
My Dell Studio 15 laptop came with a Intel® Core™ 2 Duo P8400, but I confess I wimped out and installed a 32-bit openSUSE. I did that mainly because I had an upcoming trip and that would have been my first 64-bit install, and I did not want to risk any 64-bit hiccups when on the road. (the wife would have ended my life quickly if the laptop fails while travelling 
).
I know have a 64-bit openSUSE running on my Intel Core i7 920 PC, and I see know that the apps that I typically use do not have 64-bit hiccups. Hence when openSUSE-11.2 is released, I’ll likely go from 32-bit to 64-bit on my Dell Studio 15 laptop.
It comes with – wait for it → Vista business licence downgraded to xp pro 32 bit (what a joke vista was), eligible for upgrade to windows 7 32 bit. TBH I don’t care what windows it comes with, except insofar as the windows 7 will be useful for my interoperability researches.
I’m just interested in the Linux compatibility really.
I’ve been running 64 bit Suse 11.1 for a couple of weeks now no probs, not even one little problem, on my old (4 yr?) dual core 3Ghz desktop.
Which makes me wonder about the laptop at 2 Ghz – maybe that will be a big step down — hmmm… don’t want to do that big a step down.
Your old desktop is not really dual core its hyperthreading. Guessing it’s a a P4
A true dual core will be a lot faster even at 2Ghz
/G
That’s a relief, thanks, I’ll turn my smile back on and take maybe tonight to convince myself it’s a great idea and a great bargain.
The only other comments I can think of are:
The processor should be good. My crumby Celeron is OK but nothing compared to this 2 Duo
The video is vram 512 but up to 1.8Gb if some is shared from the RAM. Does that mean that more than 4 Gb of RAM could be installed and utilised by sharing to the video. And what about virtual machines, can they use RAM that’s outside the 4 Gb you spoke of? Or is it that 4Gb is the utter limit no matter what it’s shared to?
Regarding: Bio-Protection fingerprint solution, that doesn’t impress me much.
A little beyond me John. But Virtual Machines use the system memory (Max 4GB) Not sure how swap plays with all that.
I’m also uncertain how these nvidia laptop cards work. But it sounds like the card has 512MB of it’s own dedicated memory but you can let it share memory from the sys up to 1.8GB!
:\
What I like about the dual core (and indeed my quad core i7 ) is their ability to run multiple applications at full speed. I notice this especially when rendering a video (at 99% CPU on one core), and I am still able to play movies or do other activities at the same time on the same PC, with no slow down in the rendering. Of course if the rendering software can use both cores then there will be a slow down from 199% cpu to 99% or so on the rendering application.
I’m not too fond of Acer’s laptops, too plastic, but I’d like to state that there is no reason to fear 64bit on laptops. I’ve seen dozens of them running 64bit 11.0 and 11.1 brilliantly.
These days I mainly check for videocard (either an AMD/ATI that’s known to work out of the box, or an NVidia) and wifi (preferably Atheros chipset, ath5k driver works great). AFAICS you should have no trouble. Install the latest NVidia beta driver to make sure support for the videocard is there.
Help needed? You know where it’s found 
Now I have the real quandary – this HP ProBook 4710s looks so much better than the Acer. A notebook where the manufacturer recommends SLED 10, so it must be fully compatible: HP ProBook 4710s
Does anyone see any hidden traps with any of that (bearing in mind HP’s recommendation that it’s compatible with SLED 10)?
I checked:
I note a review here: HP ProBook 4710s Video Hands On
I also found various references to the HP Pro Book 4710 being offered with SuSE. So it should be compatible.
I note it has an ATI graphics. I confess until I gain more confidence in the quality/assurance of Nvidia GPU’s (which have a relatively high failure rate -as reported in the press) for a notebook I also went with ATI. I go with nVidia on my desktops, where I have a backup.
I think this HP ProBook 4710 will cost a lot more?
My only compatibility thought was on the wireless:
I note draft-n … Does that mean an Intel 5100 or 5300 ? If so, you will need a 2.6.27 kernel or newer.
Looks good ! … but a 17.3" sceen is BIG. Do you really want a laptop that big? I’m going thru a phase where I am looking at smaller netbooks.