New laptop or not??

showing what signs of wear? What is it doing?

Specs wise its comparable to a new, but cheap laptop. Unless it's doing something really wrong, you can do some maintenance on it, such as reinstall the OS by performing a factory reset.

Get a stress test done on the 9600m, they have a tendency to die.

Software design in education is almost exclusively x86 based; the higher-end Intel CPU you can afford, all the better. Graphics won't likely matter a damn. If you require it, your school will usually supply workstations with GPUs that fall well outside your budget anyway (our games Dev course, once you reached third year, had some ridiculously high end towers. I never got to fondle the specs but I new they were a couple grand a piece). For the earlier years if you deal in 3D at all, will usually be light stuff like OpenGL basic geometry. Anything can handle that. The big thing is the CPU, it will be crunching the compiler. RAM doesn't hurt, but you likely won't benefit too much from more than 6GB. Hard Drive space is handy too, and so is a NUM pad, but shouldn't make or break your final purchase decision. I don't reccomend anything larger than 15.6", your work flow won't benefit from it anyway. If, and when you need it, just buy an external monitor and work in dualscreen. It helps a lot. Especially if you buy a monitor that can orient in Portrait mode, it makes coding a breeze.