fedora installation

[Jerry Ro]

hello all,

I am interested in installing fedora on a laptop x61t (it is, to the best of
my understanding, a 64bit machine.)

a few questions I have:

* should 60-80 GB be reasonable for full installation of fedora?

* i would like to upgrade to fedora 10 when it is available. should i
install the beta release which would make it easier to upgrade, or should i
stick to fedora 9 since it is more stable and still easy to upgrade?

* should i be worried about performance with fedora 10/9 on a laptop with
1.6Ghz processor and 4GB ram?

* last, i tried running the Live CD for x86_64 of fedora 9. i had a weird
experience - fedora loaded, but no text appeared. instead it was all black
empty spots ("null" font). should i be worried about that when coming to
install fedora in fully?

* i read somewhere that someone installed fedora 64bit on a laptop x61t like
mine, and complained that everything was incredibly slow. once he
re-installed the 32bit version, it became much better. i would like to use a
64bit version still... should i be worried about having the same behavior?

hope it is not too many quetsions.

thanks.