<p>Well I've had this laptop for maybe 4 years now, the screen messes up a little bit when its unplugged but its not bad and its still pretty usable. </p>
<p>HP G60 Notebook PC
2 GHz
3GB RAM
Mobile Intel(R) 4 Series Express Chipset Family
Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU T4200</p>
<p>I get about 2hours of battery life when not gaming, and doing school work/music/web browsing. (I have two batteries, got a second free)</p>
<p>Not sure whether or not I should just get a new laptop to last another 4 years. I was either going to:</p>
<p>-Get a new laptop before the start of college
-Get a new laptop sometime during winter break or sometime after first semester
-Wait until I get into my major classes and when I'm done with pre-reqs
-Netbook+Desktop?</p>
<p>Wait until you need a new one, you will have a much better idea of your
actual needs after you are in classes and talking to your prof’s and fellow students. When your current machine can not do what you need it to do, replace it. Every month prices will continue to go down, speed and feature will improve.</p>
<p>What is the first year programming language? if it is C/C++/Java you should be OK, if it is Ada (we tried it back in the late 80’s, lasted a year :-)) or some esoteric language that has a grande development environment, then…</p>
<p>Things like Visual Studio or Eclipse should run fine. Later on, once you know what the school needs, you can decide. In my book for CS at least desktop+netbook is immensely better than a laptop. Set up remote login to your desktop in the dorm and you can access it from the netbook with no problem…</p>
<p>Python or Java will probably be the first year language. Neither of those take up much processor. I’d buy a new laptop now, and install Linux on this one.</p>
<p>For a CS major, all you need is a working keyboard, and a text editor. If you’re using Java with an IDE like Eclipse or NetBeans or whatever, you should be okay with your PC. Generally, if you need to use higher resource apps (VS), your school will have a CS lab available. That probably won’t be until at least sophomore year. I assume you still have to take your intro CS course, your intro data structures course, a jackload of calculus, linear algebra, discrete math, etc…</p>
<p>I use an ergonomic keyboard with a desktop for school projects. That way, I have a big screen where I can arrange my many open windows and I can type quickly for long periods of time. For on the fly stuff, I use my MBP. The MBP is nice because of the *nix-based OS, but I don’t know how necessary it is.</p>
<p>The laptop could use an upgrade, but I recommend that you wait to find out whether or not you’d like an upgrade.</p>
<p>If I were you, I’d go for a desktop. Personal experience says that even a 19" screen is extremely uncomfortable for coding relative to a 23" screen. Ditto for keyboards.</p>
<p>For Linux one could do well to use VMware - avoids dual boot and all that. But to run VMware efficiently takes a computer of a few mega Watts or more - my work system for VMware Linux is a dual quad Xeon tower…</p>