<p>Either the room will have two plugs in the wall with cable access, or you can get a coaxial splitter for pretty cheap (less than $10). Before you get a splitter, make sure that it will allow each TV to get a separate feed (so both people can watch different channels at the same time).</p>
<p>As for getting a cable signal on to a laptop, you need a TV tuner card. Normally these are internal and installed inside of a desktop as a PCI card, but since your son is using a laptop, you'll want to buy an external one that just plugs into a USB port.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.newegg.com%5B/url%5D">www.newegg.com</a> is one of the more well-known places to buy these kinds of things online. I haven't done any kind of research as to the quality of these examples (you should do this on your own by reading the user reviews and looking stuff up on google), but these at least have pictures of what an internal TV tuner card would look like and what a USB one looks like.</p>
<p>Internal (PCI): Essentially long metal bar with the holes for cables, attached to a big circuit board
<a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815100130%5B/url%5D">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815100130</a></p>
<p>External (USB): Looks like a portable flash drive, except with a coaxial (cable tv) plug on the end.
<a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815260002%5B/url%5D">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815260002</a></p>
<p>Unless your son plans on getting HDTV in the future (since I'm assuming dorm cable won't have HDTV), you can probably save some money by getting a card that only handles normal tv signals as opposed to being HD capable.</p>
<p>Also, look at the specifications to make sure that whatever you're getting supports Windows Vista (and see if anybody mentions it not working well with Windows Vista).</p>