[Can I Put my GTX260m on a desktop?]

Makes sense. Though how much difference would the video memory make between the two cards? The regular 260 shows as 896MB, whereas the 260M shows as 1024MB - a ~125MB difference. The page on Newegg doesn't display the amount of CUDA cores on the 260 that I can see, so can't look at those. Wondering if perhaps the amount of Cores would be dropped since it's branded by PNY (reasoning based on the memory also being lower)??

 

The brand of a card will affect the clock speed of the cards processors, the kind of cooling setup it has, sometimes the output options and customer service/quality. They all are based on the same chip and should give performance which is within 10% of each other.

 

Cuda cores aren't actually relevant for gaming, I just used them because it was the one stat nividias website listed for both cards. but I just did a quick bit of googling and 260ms aren't actually 200 series cards, they are modified 9800s and give similar performance.

 

125MB of memory isn't a huge difference and if the 260 has DDR4/5 memory, it will have an advantage over the 260m which has DDR3.

 

Basically don't swap your 260m into the desktop, the 260 will be the same or better.

[Can I Put my GTX260m on a desktop?]

The 9600 isn't a integrated graphics card, most likely your friend was using it as a physx ( http://www.nvidia.com/object/physx_faq.html ) card or to run extra monitors.

 

Videocards with M (mobile) at the end of there name are laptop cards which are inferior to there comparable fullsize cards, so i doubt you would see any performance gain if you could use your 260m. (for example a full size 260 has 192 cuda cores, a 260m has 96

 

That computer is a pretty good deal, you will most likely want to upgrade the videocard soonish but it will give better performance then your laptop, due to the quad core and ddr3 ram.