<p>right now i have a ~4yr 15inch laptop which runs fine, i will run it until christmas.</p>
<p>with the sales during that time i probably will consider a netbook+desktop combo. my dorm is wifi only so im not sure if a desktop will work there, so im not sure what to do. are netbooks powerful enough for a CS major? if so which?</p>
<p>You can always just get a wifi adapter for a desktop.</p>
<p>Trust me, as a CS major, even a 19" screen is not big enough. You’ll only be mildly satisfied at 21", and you really need at least 23" to work comfortably.</p>
<p>Ideally, you’d have two 30" screens.</p>
<p>In the ‘real world’ we make do with a pair of 22-24 inch LCD’s and dual quad Xeon class machines for serious software development :-). </p>
<p>I should try to load Eclipse or VS 2010 on my netbook just for laughs :-). A few AMD Fusion or Ion or some such recently released netbooks are a lot better than the olde Atom based, even dual core, ones. If you have $500 for a netbook, an AMD with SSD and lots of memory should be usable.</p>