Windows XP 64 in March!

[etherealtml]

Or April....

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20874

They're also talk of the debut of Intel's 64-bit line of CPU's.

I just bought my Thinkpad T42 2378-FVU. I know the tech industry changes fast, but man I can't believe my notebook is almost obsolete and I've had it like all of 3 days.

Hooray for upgradeable desktops...

[K. Eng]

Your notebook is not obsolete, despite what the marketing flunkies and fanbois would like you to believe.

The transition to x86-64 brings two benefits

1) Ability to address more than 4GB of main memory. This is useless in notebook computers right now. The vast majority of people do not need more than 4GB of main memory to run Windows and do office tasks. I've had 512MB for almost 2 years and I have never encountered a situation where I was memory limited. I could probably get by on 256MB. And even those who want 4+GB of main memory are physically limited since most notebooks don't have more than 2 RAM slots, and the biggest soDIMM is 1GB.

2) Double the number of General Purpose Registers (GPRs). This is like doubling the cache on a chip, except that software has to be recompiled to recognize that the registers are there (as opposed to cache - which is largely invisible to the software). This will speed up some benchmarks, but in general I would say that the performance improvement would be 5-10% at most. I don't know how much performance suffers due to the decreased code density of 64-bit code but there is probably a slight penalty. Overall there would be some gain, but I doubt this would make MS Office run any faster.

People tend to think that bigger numbers mean better performance, and that 64 must be infinitely better than 32 just like 3.8 GHz must be better than 2.13 GHz. It's just not that huge of a deal.

[JHEM]

I just bought my Thinkpad T42 2378-FVU. I know the tech industry changes fast, but man I can't believe my notebook is almost obsolete and I've had it like all of 3 days.

Well, if you want to be technical about it, any computer is obselete the day it goes on sale!

Regards,

James

[AlphaKilo470]

To be even more technical, there are members on this site with 2 year old T series that are obsolete while other poeple use laptops that were made back in the 1990's when the ThinkPad line was still new that are not obsolete. What makes an item obsolete is when it no longer has the ability to perform it's intended task to the satisfaction of the users needs/wants. For graphics and video, a computer will become obsolete alot faster than would for a person who only surfs the web and runs Office. So is the computer obsolete? Not untill there is absolutely nobody in society who has any use for it, that's when it becomes truely obsolete.

[selvan777]

Mortally, mine's nearly extinct.

[ambientscape]

Include me as well...selvan!hahaha

[daeojkim]

I don't think I will need 64bit Windows for a loooong time.
For most users it will be a brag right to be able to load 64 bit Windows.