I feel that any tips I submit, even though never mentioned, hardly find their way into the laps of the people it should... I'm not bitching that anything I submit is worthwhile... but sometimes I see other submitted crap that's even more worthless :P

From a former CS Student's perspective, you'll want more balls in terms of processor speed and RAM. I know as I got deeper into my degree, the projects I was assigned really benefited from shelling out extra $$$...

Touche

Hows performance on the VM? Does it play video/audio crappy?

OneNote already has Live sharing over TCP/IP... I can only imagine this being useful if your firewall or network setup doesn't work, but I never had an issue... OneNote uses UPnP