Like with Maya, I managed to purchase this laptop second hand from my computer dealer (JCM-Concepts). The previous one was getting a bit old and sluggish in linux.
The original system had 512 MB on board, but I immediately added an additional 1024 MB upon purchasing it.

Although Windows XP was delivered with it, as I was a nearly full-time user of linux, I never installed it onto it, but basically immediately moved to Gentoo Linux. This wasn't an easy choice in the beginning as the hardware was only 6 months old, and while the majority of the hardware was supported by the kernel, a few essential things were not. I had to make do without a few things; like proper video support for one, but also no wireless, and some funky stuff with the touchpad. Luckily, the new kernels and drivers didn't take a very long time, and moving up to the unstable branch of Gentoo for a few packages helped quite a bit.
Later on, things like wireless and even Bluetooth got up and running as the kernels became newer.

As the laptop had just about everything on board, the only real hardware I added was a proper sound card: an Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA soundcard. A proper hardware-accelerated sound card is a must-have in linux as the software mixing at the time was not all that bad. Generally, hardware-acceleration is always better.

I used the system mainly for everything but gaming. I did get a subscription on Cedega to have some games I wanted to be able to play mobile as well (mainly Diablo II). Other games (UT, UT2003, Quake4) have native (linux) versions which ran excellently on the system. A bit of tweaking in the configs of the games were required as the video card was ATI.

I used the system until June 2008, when I switched over to Mac. Up until then, the system ran Gentoo Linux. As my father was looking for a computer to use for himself, I moved the laptop forward to him. As he's really not into computers (and thus, definitely not into linux), I installed the original OEM of Windows XP.
Unfortunately, only a month later, the system died down: battery and adapter were all okay, but the unit itself was as dead as a whistle. Because it was a bit too pricy to even assess the problem, I opted not to have it fixed, and managed to get an iMac for my father (who was happier with that anyway).