[JesseK]

I personally have a Lenovo with dual NVIDIA cards. It's run everything I've thrown at it from a graphics and GPGPU standpoint.

I donated my old Dell, which had a really fast Core2 Duo and a dedicated 8400M NVIDIA graphics card (purchased early '09). That laptop ran our driver's station, which had some pretty decent displays and a HUD. It also ran a suite of non-Cheesy image processing algorithms. It could also handle most of the CAD on our robots for full robot renders.

The point is, if you want to do CAD or anything graphics-related - get a dedicated card. Don't settle for integrated graphics. Whether it's Core i3/i5/i7 isn't as big a deal, IMO - but i5 is typically a decent midpoint for complex robotics-related development. If you want to make it super-fast, first burn your restore media from the HDD, then replace the HDD with a SDD (Samsung Evo 128GB is cheap-ish) and reinstall the software.

Most modern (last 2 years or so) PC touchpads are awful when they get even slightly dirty or if your fingers are sweaty. This may be a consideration if you plan to use it for a driver's station.

The team's outreach displays used to be old desktop PC's (Athlon XP's anyone?) but due to increase in media usage they'll soon be replaced by some slightly-newer-but-still-old laptops.