[Tfug] distro question - x86_64

[Matthew & Carrie]

Hey out there,

I bought a new laptop and would like some advice. It is new: Gateway / 
AMD Turion 64x2 / 1gig ram / ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 / 120 gb ATA hard 
drive / DVD RW

It has Vista on it [shudder - I am not exactly impressed, but coming 
back from overseas, I found I couldn't find much of anything that still 
had XP on it]. The system page says that it has a 32 bit operating 
system on it. That is confusing to me, as it is a Turion 64 X2. 
Shouldn't it have a 64 bit operating system?

That having said, can I run a 32 bit Linux on it? a 32 bit LiveCD like 
Knoppix? Can I even run a 64 bit Linux distro on it?

I would like to dual boot it for now to try a distro or two on it to see 
what works for this machine. I like Ubuntu on my older HP pavilion 
notebook. It seems to control the heat and memory better than other 
distros I had tried. I use Paragon Partition Manager for my other 
machine, but I downloaded the latest version and woops! it doesn't work 
yet in Vista - surprised?

I am able to run Firefox/Thunderbird, Oo, Nvu, and Audacity on Vista and 
have ditched most of the other MS programs on here. I bemoan that 
ZoneAlarm doesn't seem to work on here, but Avast! works fine.

Does anyone have a distro recommendation for this machine, or can 
someone answer my question about whether or not this machine will run a 
x86_*86 distro, or does it need a _64 distro? Also, can I use a regular 
LiveCD to run something like QtParted to partition this machine?

Thanks in advance.
Matthew