What I've seen a LOT in my classes (non-math/engineering based) is that the profs use powerpoint slides, which they sometimes make available beforehand. Some ppl print them out 6 slides to a page and write notes in the margins, some bring laptops and follow along, typing notes in a separate word file. It also works if the prof doesn't use slides and doesn't like writing stuff down on the board, cause you just type down everything and if you want, condense them later into notes.
So it's helpful, but not absolutely necessary. I'd say about a third of the students in a typical humanities/social sciences class at my school use them, and only half of them for notetaking, half are just facebooking or youtubing. But remember you can use the laptop while studying too, not just at lecture!
I'd get as small of a notebook as you're comfortable with (13 inch, maybe even smaller) cause although you'll lose a lot of power (ie you probably can't play any recent games on it) 1) you get better battery life, so you don't have to sit near the ends of the rows to plug your computer into the wall sockets and 2) a lot easier to carry around. You already have a desktop so I wouldn't recommend a big, powerful laptop (I have the same setup, a desktop at home and a 10inch laptop, 1.1Ghz cpu for wordprocessing/excel/internet in the library w/ 4 hrs of battery. When studying it's great cause I plop myself in the library for a couple of hours, put on some music, and if I need to I go to wikipedia/some other site to look up stuff, or review slides from lecture, or my notes, without having to print stuff out.)
And for math classes, I've seen people type out the equations at normal typing speed using LaTeX, it's kinda sick. Freaking geeks.
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