Okay, the time has come to bite the bullet and buy a new laptop.
I am currently using an HP ZD7188cl, 17 inch screen, 3.2 GHz Pentium 4, 2 GB ram, 100 GB hardrive, R/W Cd/DVD, etc...
I am looking at this one:
HP Pavilion dv9000t CTO NB
Windows XP Media Center
Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo...