[kwlug-disc] upgrading hardware/64bit OS

[Insurance Squared Inc.]

My wife is running Mandriva(32bit) on her business computer with a 
couple of gigs of ram.  Everything runs fine except her windows 
bookkeeping app.  I've got virtualbox installed to run windows and it's 
just slow -  slow enough that she mentions it.

My thinking is that she needs more RAM.  To get more RAM, she really 
needs a 64 bit OS.  For a 64 bit OS, I need a machine that has a 
processor that will work with that (is that correct?  I've tried to 
install mandriva 64bit before on other machines and it objected because 
the hardware wasn't 64 bit).

Am I on the right track here?  Upgrade her hardware to a new processor 
with lots of RAM, then upgrade the OS to take advantage of the RAM, then 
virtualbox will run faster?  If so, what kind of hardware should I be 
looking at, processor-wise and how much ram would you get?

g.