In need of an ideal setup

I've been learning a lot of the basics of programming for the past few months. I want to start to get a lot more into it, and I want to look into getting a laptop just for the purpose of wordprocessing for school and programming in basic,java, and c. Since this is all I'm going to be using it for, I don't need a great machine. I want something very cheap and as small as possible. Also, I hear that making windows applications is a lot harder than a lot of other os, so an alternate os that is well suited for programming would be grat as well. Thanks in advance
     -not you                

I can't decide if >>2 is serious of not...