1. A Barebones 64 Bit Notebook With All Kinds Of Potential

MSI's MS-1029 Barebones notebook supports Socket 754 Mobile AMD Sempron and Turion MT 64 CPUs and can be customized to fit your needs.

As a computing enthusiast I love to build desktop and server PCs from the ground up. What fun it is matching motherboard, CPU, graphics card, memory, disk drives and other stuff to create my ideal computer every six months or so. I never thought of mobile computers in the same way. I mean, they come to you signed, sealed and delivered. Sure, I've upgraded memory or the disk drive on a laptop or notebook, but that's it. I don't like forcing my way into those fortresses for fear of breaking something.

Imagine my delight when MSI sent me one of their MS-1029 barebones notebooks to review. Somewhere in the back of my consciousness I knew about these things, but I never really had a chance to touch and mess around with one of them. Within the limits of the notebook's barebones configuration and form factor, you can actually pick the CPU, memory and disk drive you want to install. Don't want wireless networking and Bluetooth? Shun those options. Wow!

And, this isn't a notebook for wimps. It supports AMD's powerhouse Socket 754 Mobile Sempron and Turion 64 MT CPUs. It comes with ATI's Mobile Radeon X700 GPU with 128 MB of VRAM, a dual-layer DVD burner, a decent 4400 mAh battery and lots of the other features we've come to expect in a higher end notebook PC.

For all its great features and flexibility, one question hangs over the MS-1029 and all other 64 bit notebooks. Is now the time to go 64 bit? In making a buy-no-buy decision about 64 bit notebook hardware you have to take into account a number of positives and negatives. On the up side well written 64 bit applications in a properly configured computer running a 64 bit operating system such as Windows XP Pro X64 will run faster than the 32 bit versions of those apps. On the down side is the current shortage of 64 bit applications you would want to run on a notebook and the higher resource demands of 64 bit hardware. In this article I look at the MS-1029 and the state of 64 bit computing to help you make a thumbs-up or down decision regarding this exciting, but still young technology.

NOTE: In late August and early September of 2005 MobilityGuru ran a two part story on AMD's Turion processors. The first part focused on the processors from a technical perspective. The second part included a comparison of the European equivalent of the MS-1029 (the MSI MEGABOOK M635) with an AMD Turion MT-34 and a Gigabyte W511A notebook with a Pentium M 750 CPU. The article included a series of 32 bit tests run under Windows XP Home edition (an X32 version of XP).