My laptop's specs are 18" widescreen, 100GB HDD, 1GB RAM, 287MB NVidia GeForce Go 6150 video card, and around 5 lbs. It cost about $1000, which was a bargain last year when I bought it. The battery runs for a good 3 hours before depleting using Power Save mode, so the battery isn't too dependable. It is a HP Pavilion dv9410us notebook PC (quite popular among college students, actually). You should definitely buy a smaller screen since you want a good battery life (the 3 hours on mine are mainly due to the high end video demands, so my laptop acts as my school desktop). Since you're a comp sci major I'm guessing you'd want a relatively mobile notebook, so just go with a smaller version of my laptop if you like that setup. Computers are really customizable nowadays, anyway, so you shouldn't have much trouble. Oh, and do not get Vista OS. My laptop randomly freezes because of Vista.