Thanks Matt and John, Matt, I don't know what BSOD means. Is there a way in 7 to eliminate the log in feature? I'm very ignorant of windows conventions. This one, signing in or clicking the screen away is in my face every time I boot into XP. I don't like having to pass a test to get into my own computer. I live in a remote area and I trust my wife and two cats implicitly. So security stuff is just spurious noise in my life. Our house can't even be locked. I don't have anything in the puter to hide from anyone. I understand the reasons behind it but my life is outside of the need for such stuff.

You mentioned 64 bit drivers. The laptop will be for gigs only for me. My wife will use it occasionally to access online pages related to her work. The company she works for doesn't support mac browsers so she will be using it for that. I tell you this because I wonder what other 64 bit drivers might we need? I can foresee something for adobe pdfs. Java? and related stuff maybe?

Ron