You can do whatever you want it ' s your life , why do you feel the need to ask permission ? Must still live with parents . don ' t worry won ' t day you will develope an out of the womb way of thinking . the guy killed in the chair was the Italian prime minister . Whatever delusions you need to see otherwise is your own justification for existence <| sep |> You should check that your laptop meets or exceeds the specifications required by the college of engineering and department of computer science . It ' s been over 10 years since I graduated , but , as I recall , a lot of the course projects could be done by connecting to one of the lab computers on the rlogin cluster through an ssh session . That means that if your computer is capable of running a program like PuTTY or ssh , then you would be able to do your work without any problems . Other courses required you to use a local development environment like Visual Studio or Eclipse . Given the specs of your machine , that shouldn ' t be a problem either . You should talk with your advisor and some of the professors that will be teaching courses you will be taking to get a better idea about what type of projects you will be working on , but it doesn ' t look like you will have a problem with the laptop you ' re planning to buy .