Thanks for giving me the lowdown on hardware.
I need to get a quad core. I bought a motherboard that could handle one when I built my PC but the price was right (ha) on a dual-core and I was on a budget, so i bought that. Though, from the sound of things, if I want to get serious about animation, I need at least a couple more computers. My other computer is an Athlon single-core, I might be able to do some light animation on it, but that would involve installing Windows on it (ugh) or learning how to animate in Blender. Right now I mostly just do flybys with blinking lights and camera movement and things like that but I'd like to get into some more serious animation. Your films are motivating to that end, they make me want to go animate everything right now.
