Well as far as gaming goes...that won't get you much (if you're hard-core). Now, if you want to play some Age of Empires, Doom II, or Simcity 3000 (games like that), then you could give it a go. However, games like Empire Earth II, Half-Life 2, etc, no, only laptops I know of that could play those are a Dell XPS Gen2 or an Alienware 7700 (which both cost around 3-$4,000 with good upgrades). But my advice, to keep it in good shape, is to have no games on it, don't work the hardware too much. Your PC would be fine for playing music/videos/internet, and office work. I have a Dell D505 Centrino 1.4 Ghz, 1GB, and 60GB, 64MB Intel Graphics, and it does all of the above just fine. To make it last a long time? Well...make sure it doesen't overheat (BIG factor!), don't use it as much as you would a desktop (maybe for only 2 hours at a time), and try to keep installed apps, to a minimum. I've done that on my old Pentium Pro laptops, and they still work just fine, even if they are a bit outdated.
As far as system-data, my laptop usually runs at 6-8,000 handles, and 180-200MB PF usage, so I'd try to aim for maybe 6-7,000 handles and...well if you have 512MB, I'd go for less than 200MB usage, but then again maybe I run my laptop too much on bare-bones, haha.
