I currently have an Acer Travelamte 800, about 5 years old. 1.3Mhz Centrino,
4Gb Ram, 80Gb 7200rpm HD. The screen is 1400 x 1050

The sound on it has stopped working, not that this is important.

I am considering replacing it with a new laptop and am considering options.
It will be used for development and will need to run Studio and Office,
games will not be run but I might play the odd DVD.

In the past when replacing hardware the main driver has been running out of
RAM, so as the new box will hopefully run another 5 years I was wondering if
I should go for an X64 system, otherwise I mgiht find I run out of RAM with a
future app and cannot upgrade the hardware.

So firstly have any of you used 64bit laptop that you could recommend?
Ideally I need a 15.4" screen at least 1400x1050, hopefuly more, (it can be
widescreen or not) and the fastest hard disk (huge capacity not neccessary)

Secondly, and independent of 64bit boxes, should I go for XP or Vista? When
I last looked at this there were a considerably number of problems running VS
on Vista, have these been resolved?

Guy