Can I run Minecraft smoothly with my specs?

These are my specs to my laptop. It's a gateway Model M-2625U, 2gb RAM, 160HD, AMD turion x2 64bit, ATI RAdeon premium graphics Vista home premium. I took out 2gb of ram, is that the reason it does run Minecraft smoothly? Should I upgrade my ram back to 4gb?

Yes. Upgrade to the 4 GB of RAM. Most laptops come prestocked with upwards of 4GB of RAM and if you expect to play any other games you'll need 4GB as a bare MINIMUM! Minecraft will run with 2, but not very fast. You may want to upgrade soon though, especially if it still runs on Vista. Try HP, they make great computers and you can customize them online.