Returning player with questionsFollow

Hey everyone, seems like somebody posts one of these things every couple of days, eh?

Okay, here's the long and short of what's up with me:

Around May of last year (2008) I hung up my sword, as it were. I was a raid OT paladin on the Lucan D'lere server by name of Stallanar - and I'm still on station players if anyone wants to check out what I looked like before hanging it up so they can better answer my questions.

Basically the game had gotten stale and I was looking for something new so I flipped over to world of warcraft to see how that was. I've enjoyed it for the passed year, but recently the guild I was in broke up, and the game just hasn't been any fun anymore. Now, the wife wants me to come back to EQ2 so we can play again and I'm pretty much all for it. However, since it's been a year since I've been in Norrath I thought I should ask a few questions to see what's been going on. Of course, these things are going to be grouped together by 'type of question' since I basically am starting from scratch (except for my toon, I'm resurrecting the Iksar pally once more!)

Computer questions:
I've been running WoW rather successfully on my hp dv6000 series laptop, but I'm quite sure that the more demanding graphics of EQ2 will be too much for it. My old desktop rig that I built myself ran with a an AMD 3.0ish ghz processor on an asus a8ne mobo, I had 3gb of ddr2 and had popped an nvidia 7000 series (i think) card in there. yeah, a lot of old stuff but I haven't turned that big old beast on in over a year now. That being said, I'm looking to buy a new rig and it seems like I can get something for around $550 from Best buy that's as good as or better than anything I could put together myself for roughly the same price. The two rigs I'm looking at are linked below:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9168205&type=product&id=1218041999474 (HP Pavilion, $559)

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9156478&type=product&id=1218038551741 (Gateway, $509)

I'm thinking either of these with an 8800 series nvidia SHOULD be more than enough, but I'm worried that the 1.8ghz on the quad-core processor might not be enough to handle EQ2, I've been reading that the game still isnt quite up to speed with hyperthreading and that instead of getting 4 processors at 1.8ghz it would only see 1 or sometimes 2 processors at 1.8ghz (ish) and that'll reduce the framerate or cause some significant lag - both of which **** me off. So, hardware guys I need help, since I've been out of the rig-building loop since right around the time dual-cores came out (I got scared and ran away).

Gameplay questions:
Okay, I went to wow to get away from tanking. After Wrath of the Lich King I made a Death Knight and guess what... I ended up tanking because it was just too much fun. Now, back in EQ2 land I've got a paladin that already WAS an accomplished tank but I'm guessing his gear is so far behind now that most of the MOBS in the new zones would laugh at him shortly before /instakill happened. So, how much has gameplay changed for the paladin over the passed year? Are we still good group tanks and raid OT/ MT-in-a-pinch? Or, should I look at getting back to being an SK?
Lastly... how's the Najena server? My wife created ye ol' toon on there and wants me to bring his lizard-ness over from Lucan.

Okay... ultra-long post for my initial posting on the Alla forums but it had to be done. I appreciate anyone who's read through this far and any help anyone can give would be greatly appreciated. And here's to seeing some or all of you out there on the interwebs!

Stall

Thanks a ton for that link to "Can you RUN it?". Very useful!