<p>How is a basic undergrad computer graphics course going to really tax even a ten-year-old computer? Unless you’re talking about rendering times for, say, ray-tracing and radiosity. Seems like a minor inconvenience to me.</p>
<p>I think a large monitor is more important than the system. FYI you may find it easier to install a Linux partition and do all of your programming on that. I find UNIX/Linux programming “cleaner” and more straightforward than Windows, but I’m hardly an expert so don’t listen to just me. Not to mention UNIX and C programming go together like calculus and physics.</p>
<p>But the basic bullet point is that you don’t need any kind of performance machine for undergrad computer science, the curriculum will barely have changed, if at all, from what it was ten years ago. Data structures and algorithms, C/C++, etc., are very much the same. The applications change, the theory (at the undergrad level) barely changes from one year to the next.</p>