For our "old eyes" we plugged in a large monitor to our small programming laptop. Now we have one programmer on the laptop squinting and the other programmers and me on the big screen. Saves everyone hunkered around a tiny screen. A "some day" project would be to get a projector screen to program with.
For the 2009 season we used laptops we had from the years before no problem, but when we got to our first regional the laptop had connection "issues" as it was a Win2K and not an XP/Vista. Thankfully I had my own XP 17" laptop there all ready to go, and before our next regional I bought a $599 Vista laptop to do the programming on. I forget the make/model but it performs great with Labview.
Yes, Labview needs lots of screen to program properly! And yes -- be consistant with the keyboards: One man's CTRL key is another man's DEL key, if you know what I mean.
Kingofl337's laptop life cycle is probably true, so $599 is a better value than my own $1800 with bells-and-whistles laptop.