Hi,
I've recently decided to make the dual boot jump for my laptop, needless to say I am pretty clueless about Linux, so please bare with me.

Main cause of this is that I don't want to make my main OS 64 bit just yet because of lack of driver support, however having a alternative OS dual booted would be handy

Your probably sick of these posts but I'm looking for a Linux distribution which fits my requirements, can I get some advice?

I need a distro that makes the most of 64 bit processing and makes the most of my AMD Turion dual processor cores. Brings me to a sub question, could I dual boot Vista on a 32bit system and Linux as a 64bit?

I plan to use it for internet access and general high performance media encoding and decoding tasks. Also having as much driver support as possible will save me alot of time and effort.

Heres my spec from memory (Cant use Ddxdiag at the moment, not on my laptop):
AMD Turion 64 TL-60 x2
2048mb RAM
ATI Radeon® Xpress 1270 HyperMemory
160gb Hard Drive
Dell Wireless LAN Card 802.11b

If this proves and impossible task I will just install XP 64bit on the other side of my dual boot.

Thanks!

Well that would be any linux distro, when you go to download the .iso pick the one you need for your platform 32/64bit.


Yes

Ubuntu has a release that is more geared for media.

Well, from the comparisons I've found, many of them either dont support 64bit processing and many which do arent particularly user friendly.

I will look into Ubuntu though. Thanks. Any other media heavy solutions suitable for a beginner? In fact, since I'm so much of a beginner is it best to stick with the main distros? Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat?

Install using multi-lib support (32 and 64 bit support).