That laptop will do you just fine.
The 1.5 GHz Core 2 Duo should do just fine. The processor specs that Pinnacle gives are for the Pentium HT and AMD Dual core. The Core 2 Duo is more advanced that those processors and gets a lot more oomph per GHz than those older processors. The Core 2 Duo is really quite an amazing processor. 1.5 GHz in a Core 2 Duo gets you a lot compared to the older Pentium HT or the AMD X2 dual core.
Some of the system RAM is reserved for video memory. So the 2 GB of RAM in the computer will show up as 1.99 GB of system RAM in the OS. If the computer is showing 0.99 GB of RAM then they lied in the specs and only have 1 GB of RAM in the computer. If 0.99 was just a typo and it is 1.99 then you’re all good.
Install SIW (System Information for Windows). It will show you a good summary of the specs for the computer including the amount of RAM and other components.
One tweak you should do is go to
Control Panel >> System >> Advanced System Settings
Click the Settings… button under Performance
Go to the Data Execution Prevention tab
Set the option to “Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select”
That turns on hardware DEP for all processes. It will better protect your system from buffer overflow exploits than the default DEP settings. Buffer overflow exploits are a common way to try to compromise the computer now-a-days. Turning on DEP for all processes gets you protection that software based anti-virus cannot do.
