personally, besides multi-tasking… gaming and (more importantly) 3D design/Modeling and Rendering
Exactly! I just got a new quad-core machine at work, with a Quadro 3500 Videocard; Much nicer than the single-core/Quadro 3400 that I had. Nicer being rendering and processing time improvements like whoa.
I guess going to 4 gigs of ram from 2, as well as 1 7200rpm drive to Raid 15000rpm stripped drives makes a little difference as well.
the above rig is pretty insane lol. I wanna try crysis on it 
Sadly im more into the gaming laptop scene then desktops and its so much harder to keep up-to-date. I realized its time for a desktop rig after OJ box and not being able to run everything on full anymore. granted its a 4 year old laptop, its still depressing watching everything out perform me
e-penis’
Holy crap can 4 year old laptops even play games? Jesus. But technically there is no such thing as a gaming laptop unless your spending almost 5g’s on a laptop. My laptop is worth about $1400 and manages to play crysis on all medium (except shadows on low), 1280x800 dx9 mode (on vista 32bit) at a surprisingly playable 24 fps on average (sometimes as low as 14 or as high is 32). Not too shabby.
If your wondering its a Dell Inspiron 1520 with:
8600m gt (slightly overclocked core/shader/mem)
2 gb ddr2 667
T7500 2.2 Ghz core 2 duo
160gb 7200rpm hd
hehe nice DJ, i got the Dell 9400. 1.83 duo core, 1gig DRR, 7900 GS. Dumbed down version of yours but as long as it can play TF 2, upcoming SC 2, and up coming W.A.R ill be proud of it
ya man, a laptop that can play crysis PERIOD is decent IMO. Ill sell it in a couple weeks tho, a heads up for anybody whos interested.