Right now, I'm using a Toshiba Satellite C55. It's got a 2.16 GhZ Celeron, with 4GB RAM and a 500GB hard drive. It has a 15.6" screen at 1366x768, shipped with Windows 8.1, and I'm dualbooting Xubuntu 14.04.
CAD- My team uses Inventor. The 2015 version runs well, though having multiple things open bogs it down a bit. Blender on Xubuntu runs well though.
Driver Station- Runs absolutely perfectly. Only minor glitch is with my ethernet jack, but that's because VirtualBox has a strange internet driver. Haven't tried running the DS in Wine yet.
Programming- LabVIEW, WindRiver, and Eclipse run well. No complaints (save for the glitch in installing WindRiver on Windows 8 and later, which turned out to be a moot point since it's being dropped for 2015 :/)
Other things?- This thing is my primary computer. Firefox and Opera Next run perfectly fine, Steam runs with minimal issues, Team Fortress 2 is okay on low graphics, Euro Truck Simulator 2 is beautiful, osu! is perfect, and many small games work perfectly. Spotify works well, and VLC plays my videos. iTunes runs like iTunes (aka like crap). Can't complain.
It was a birthday gift, but it was still $300 well spent.
Toshiba also has
this guy that should do everything much better and can have a touchscreen if you want that!
(I
maaaay be a bit of a Toshiba fan.)