Unfortunately, problems with the new laptop started to arise over the next few weeks: There were non-working drivers, non-working apps and among many other things the standby mode was also not working. Troubleshooting these problems always pointed to problems regarding the 64bit version of the operating system Windows because most of the applications run in a 32bit compatibility mode…

…so we decided to re-install the laptop with the 32bit version of Windows 7 in February and since then, all the problems became history

There was still the question as to why one should use a 64bit version? To answer that question, please read the nicely written article on the newsweek blog: http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/techtonicshifts/archive/2009/09/16/64-bit-computing-the-next-big-confusing-thing.aspx

To answer the question whether you should use a 32bit or 64bit version of Microsoft Office, here is a very good blog article: http://blogs.technet.com/dmelanchthon/archive/2010/04/23/welche-office-2010-version-soll-ich-nehmen-32-bit-oder-64-bit.aspx

If you unable to read German, here is the summary in English: Don’t use the 64bit version of MS Office unless you need to create or open office documents bigger than 2GB