Makes sense to me that things should run if one switches to 64-bits, but what do I know?

However, I did get a follow-up email from HP which gave me links to a whole raft of drivers, which they explained were the 64-bit drivers for my particular notebook. What these do is run the hardware at 64-bits. There was no caveat that some programs wouldn't run. And what I read before was that some hardware wouldn't run at 64-bit, but apparently none on this laptop.

What installing these don't do is allow me to remove all the Yahoo, Norton and HP garbage with which it comes loaded. To the gills. One would think that a 200GB HD would be for the use of the purchaser.

Nope. It's for the sellor and the sellor's accomplices. Sort of like buying an extended play, super-informative DVD movie with 105 minutes of movie and 120 minutes of commercials.

Hope that helps clarify things a bit. But on the desktop under the most demanding conditions I can set up the 32-bit version works superbly well. I would not have imagined what it does could be done with stuff available to your average consumer.

Arf