You really do have to have a pretty powerful computer to produce gaming videos on the web these days. But even budget laptops are getting a lot more powerful today, and can often run the bulk of most games and applications pretty well. In the case of my new laptop, I got a lot of powerful hardware for a fairly cheap price, but the sacrifice was ending up with a junk webcam. The good news is the old laptop still works as far as the webcam goes, it just wont run any games really. The nvidia graphics card fried on it, so all it has is the integrated intel graphics chip, which can't run anything other than webcam recordings.
So, I'm still using the old PC for its web cam alone now, but the hard drive on it is failing as well. 2 of the 3 USB ports are dead on the old PC as well, so I know its going to work for much longer. Meanwhile, the new PC works great for my games, and that's what really matters.