From what I see, the things worth keeping are the graphics card, psu, HDD, and CPU Cooler. If you're going to upgrade, instead of sell, the first purchases should definitely be a new motherboard and CPU. If you want it to take over your laptop and be your main computer, I'd advise you to put the extra money into it and get a much newer processor and motherboard. Triple channel memory, and i7 cpu models would be key to look for, in order to "futureproof" your computer as much as possible. The i7 models have pushed processing to a threshold that has no need to be broken for a good 5 years.
Upgrading your RAM would be necessary as well, the 4 GB kit you have at 800 Mhz won't cut it in a new motherboard. You'll want to buy a kit of 3x2 GB and when you have 6 GB memory, you rarely use it all up. This gives you extra head room and less stress overall.
If you want an extremely fast cpu, look for a motherboard that has SATA 6gb/s with a raid controller on-board. Setting up a raid configuration with your hard disk drives improves your computers capabilities immensely. There are many ways to go about set ups here, but my advice would be grabbing two cheap SSDs (Still standing drives) at 60 gb volume, and raiding them. OCZ has been reported to have higher speeds on the market and smaller SSD drives are becoming less and less expensive. I'd suggest the Vertex 2 60GB. It runs at $120 but, a pair of those will handle your os and any games you plan to run, boosting your gaming experience far beyond anything you've touched so far
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Btw, I hope you kept your extra screws for the Hyrdo pump cooler, the i5 and i7 sometimes use different sockets, and you'd have to adjust accordingly.
Keep your current harddrives for videos/pictures and whatever else you want to throw on them. Try to keep only the most used programs on your SSD's, they do not increase any video quality so throwing a movie on them is rather useless... Just means your media player will find it quicker.
Granted I know this is basically building a computer around your video card, but it will give you headroom for quite a few years. You did go out and spend quite a bit for that 5870, so I figured this idea might somewhat appease you. If I were in your shoes, I'd probably end up selling the laptop and gut the desktop and go with the build I mentioned. Yea, it'd cost me (a starving student) my meals for the next few months, but I'd at least have no doubt that my system will keep me distracted from my bellowing stomach. Anyway, hope this helps if you were considering upgrading, if not I at least had some fun thinking up the system in my head.
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