<p>Just keep in mind that few laptops can match a purpose-built desktop… At any price. My work desktop is a nice dual quad Xeon… Doing VMware Linux builds it gets slow :-). Does the OP **need **a laptop?</p>
<p>I’d say ask the school - they have minimum expectations so that one does not walk in the first day of class with a netbook and expect it to run Visual Studio 2010…</p>
<p>RachelFran’s answer is dead on - I never thought about the part of team work…</p>