I own a laptop as my primary computer - a Compaq Presario R3000.
At the time that I bought this (A year and a half ago), the video card I have was the best they had available. Unfortunately it’s welded to the motherboard, and I don’t know how to upgrade laptops, so I’m stuck with it. It kind of limits the games I can play, but I don’t feel like purchasing I new computer. Everything else I’m pretty satisfied with.
Thats the thing with laptops, they can be hard to upgrade, even if you do know what you are doing. Too often the manufacturers limit how much you can upgrade the thing. And it is usually much more expensive to do so. I know a few people whom reckon it is sometimes cheaper to just buy a new laptop than to bother with a significant upgrade.
My primary home computer is an Athlon64 3200+, Asus K8V motherboard, 1 gig of RAM, and a GeForce 6600GT-based video card. I’ve got a 60gig hard drive and another 160gig drive that’s barely in use. (Only half is even partitioned, and I’ve hardly got anything on it.)
I’ve also got an IBM ThinkPad T40 which my employer provides for me. As I recall it’s a 1.5 gigahertz mobile Pentium CPU with 512mb of RAM. I don’t remember the rest of the specs, but since it’s technically only a loaner it doesn’t matter that much.
Why dont you put Linux on the other partition? This would be a good use for that other partition if you like Linux or dont mind trying it out. And there are many 64-bit distrubutions out there, in fact there have been many out for years. SUSE is the distro I would suggest.
To be honest, I have absolutely idea what the specs on my computer are. It’s an HP laptop that is a few years old and it does everything I need it to do. I used to build gaming machines and could quote the frame rates of my cards. Computers have been so well built in the last few years, I really can’t justify buying a new one. So I did check and:
2.1 ghz Athlon
60 gb Hard Drive
DVD-RW
750 mb of ram
Ten or even five years ago I was lucky to have a computer for more than three months before I upgraded it so much that it was no longer resembling what I started with. I still have my ye olde Mac 5200 that will not die. My old 512k Mac also won’t die but is of pretty much no use at this point.
I had my Commodore 64 for years and years! It was sort of fun tinkering with such an old system. But that did eventually break down. I could not reallly do anything all that useful with it of course, but I did manage to teach myself a little BASIC on it. That was when I was 12 or so, so back then it was not so obselete.
These days I like to try and have a reasonably up to date system. Not because I play a lot of demanding games, though this is a small factor, but because I love building systems and being able to say I have a powerful machine.
I mean, my current system is more powerful than I need right now (its mainly for internet surfing, basic documents and programming), but at least I will not have to upgrade any time soon, although most likely I will upgrade to at least 1 GB of RAM.
I guess its the computer geek in me that is the main reason I like to have such powerful systems. 
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. Your systems put mine too shame. Mind you, with the upgrades I have planned, this wont be quite so true. It is a pity my motherboard is a crumm 754 socket system, so no dual-core for me for a while. Though one day I will go in that direction, when I start doing more demanding things.
