next year i'm going to college and i want to know my options. i have a macbook aluminum 2.4 ghz… 4gb ddr3, but i know i'm going to need windows visual studio to program next year. I don't want to partition my hard drive.

my options:
1. i was thinking about building a computer off of newegg.. which is a little pricy.
2. i really want to get an external hard drive, and run windows 7 off of that and buy a monitor so it's like i have 2 computers, and not just one… but not really? see what i mean? is this possible. much cheaper.
you could just install paralells and run windows as a virtual machine on your mac
running win7 from a external will be painfully slow, you could always buy an eee PC and use that with windows Xp works damn well and is portable.