According to the reviewers, yes. I don't own one myself, but I've been looking for a laptop with about the same specifications as that one and I'm considering buying this. It'll definitely be good for gaming (it'll run the latest, most demanding games on medium to high settings), and I think it should do fine for programming. However, I should caution you that 5-6 years is a very long time for a laptop. If you take good care of it you should be able to keep it running that long, but it will probably not last that long as far as keeping up with modern games go. And one other thing--you might want to make sure you don't have the 1366x768 display, it's not very good and the main complaint of reviewers, so if you would be bothered by a low-quality screen you should consider uprgrading that to the 1920x1080.