I looked into putting 64-bit on a notebook a while back, the last holdup is a driver for broadband access.

so right now, i swap out hard drives.

what I am really waiting before i get yet another notebook? 1) quad-core,

2) one or 2 external x4 SAS ports so I can rig a small box of 2.5in SFF SAS drives, it would be nice to do demos with 10-20 disk drives, with 2 x4 SAS ports, I can do 1.6GB/sec.

My Vostro can hold 2 internal SATA drives, but the cheap soft metal screw holding the drive is stripped, so that won't be coming out. I tried ESATA, but could not get it to work.

3) 8-16GB memory, come on, a big 17in notebook, the Vostro only exposes 1 memory socket, the other is not accessible?, there ought to be room for 4 SO-DIMMs, I will wait for 4GB.

The other thought is to buy a small and light desktop, and operate headless, w/o monitor, remoting in from my notebook

Right on, Andy!  I fully support (RED) and I love the creativity behind trying to solve problems that seem unsolvable.

Chuck

Dell might ship it with only 32bit, but the drivers for x64 are all downloadable. I rebuilt mine to x64 and found all the drivers I needed, even the Verizon internal broadband, on dell support.

On my Dell 620 to get to the second memory slot, I had to remove the keyboard. Google tech suport manual and all the instructions with photos is avaiable in pdf.