I recall spending hundreds of dollars a semester on books. I distinctly remember my Organic Chemistry text was well in excess of $100. The cost of a computer am

I recall spending hundreds of dollars a semester on books. I distinctly remember my Organic Chemistry text was well in excess of $100. The cost of a computer amortized over the entire college experience is not a whole lot compared to other costs. For most people, a netbook would be able to get the job done. It might not be ideal, but you could make it work. Even for CS majors, you could just use a netbook and fire up an EC2 small instance if you needed something more powerful. You can get a lot done on EC2 before hitting the price of two slices of pizza and a coke.