[Riding]

So my laptop got fried and I've done without for long enough. So couple questions for teh TechMonkeys.

Buying(I'm going Dell as I have always had great experience with them):
1. Anyone have a good lay description of the difference between 32 and 64 bit Vista?
2. Anything I should look for that's a must have these days? I'm already sold on Blue Tooth and integrated webcam.
3. My plan is to rebuild my other laptop, so I'm likely going to get a smaller laptop this time. Thinking Inspiron15.

Most important question:
I have a bunch of internal harddrives laying around with various old photo's etc( I had 3 PCs die on me within a 2 week span). What's the best way to get that information off of the Internal HDs? My plan is to save them off to an external hard drive. Is there some kind of external USB unit that you can just plug the internal hard drives into and copy? Or something I can build myself somehow?

Thanks.

 

[jonKranked]

Unless you are doing CPU intensive stuff (3d cad/rendering, heavy computational stuff) there's no real advantage to 64 bit over 32. If anything it can be a disadvantage due to availability of hardware drivers (not all companies support 64 bit OS's).

as for getting the old stuff off, you can buy adapters and external HD housings to get your info. Should run you less than $50.

edit:

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=92&name=External-Enclosures

 

[binary visions]

Don't bother with an enclosure if you're just pulling data off. Buy one of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812232002

 

[Riding]

Thanks guys, so the enclosure is basically used to take an internal hard drive and make it into an external hard drive. I might get one of those and use it for all the hard drives I have, but then use the latest hard drives for backup storage or something.