$1200 or slightly more to spend on a computer

In My Humble Opinion
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Short answer is yes. Longer answer is that the laptop copy will be jiggered specifically to work with that laptop’s hardware (motherboard chipset drivers, for example) and performance will be unpredictable on different hardware. Actually, I predict a lot of crashes when Windows tries to talk to hardware that’s not there.

Happily, you can readily find XP Pro as an “OEM” version for $140 or so - the minor snag is you need to buy it with hardware. Fortunately, a lot of vendors consider a $3 power cable to be hardware. :cool:

As for 64-bit OS and applications. Don’t worry about it. By the time the world is 64-bit, you’ll probably have replaced this computer.

If you hadn’t already bought the thing, I was going to aim you at Maximum PC’s October issue. Last month, they built a $13,000 “Dream Machine” - now they have a $1200 “Lean Machine” that’s no slouch at gaming.

The quick specs: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ on an MSI K8N Neo4/SLI mobo, 1 GB RAM, 300 GB drive, and nVidia GeForce 6800 GT. On the forward-looking side, the processor can handle a 64-bit OS, and the mobo/video card can run SLI, which is a way of strapping two video cards together for enhanced performance.

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To expand upon VCO3’s explanation, here are the common/cheap RAID configurations

0: Striped. Your data is divided across both drives. This doubles read and write times, but makes you twice as vulernable to hardware failure. If either disk dies, your data is toast.
1: 2 Mirrored. Both hard drives have the same data on them. This gives you roughly twice the speed on reads, but does not improve write performance. It also gives you protection against hard drive failure. Even if one disk fails, the other has all your data. Obviously, you only have half as much useable space as you have disk drives.

There are others (RAID 5/6) that are also common, but they require at least 4 hard drives to be effective and often require expensive hardware to implement. Wikipedia on RAID.