I love threads like this! They distract me from pulling my hair out over some of the other less fun off-season threads. Anyways, here are the computers we have:
(5) Panasonic ToughBook CF19 MK2
Purpose: Programming/Utility
Specs: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.06GHz, digitizer touchscreen, 2GB RAM, Windows 7, Cellular modems
Story: The ToughBook series is a fully ruggedized laptop for use in harsh environments. We had 5 of these donated by the local ambulance company. In their former lives they were used by ambulance crews and fire department paramedics to write patient care reports after their calls. We are currently refurbishing them (installing hard drives and operating systems). Once that is complete they will be used for the build team (reading manuals while assembling parts, etc.) and potentially programming.
Images:
http://imgur.com/a/gXakG
(1) Acer Aspire E11
Purpose: Driver station/Programming
Specs: Intel Celeron 1.83GHz, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, Windows 7
Story: This is the standard netbook/laptop provided in the Rookie Kit of Parts. For us, we used it as our driver station/occasional programming laptop. We aren't huge fans of it because of it's poor compute performance and low battery life, so we're looking at replacing it with a Thinkpad.
(1) Lenovo G50 15.6-inch Laptop
Purpose: Utility
Specs: Intel Pentium N3530 2.16 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 500GB HDD, Windows 8
Story: This laptop was donated by the school when they received a new order of Thinkpads. It was absolutely terrible until we removed all the spyware and junk it came with. At first we used it as our driver station, but we replaced it with the Aspire E11 because of it's size. Currently it powers our parts status display in our shop, but it is also used for email, web browsing, reading manuals, etc.
(1) ASUS K501UX 15.6-inch Laptop
Purpose: Scouting data visualization/CAD
Specs: Intel Core i7-6500U 2.5GHz, NVIDIA GTX 950M GPU; 8GB RAM; 256GB SSD, Windows 10
Story: We wanted to obtain a reasonably powerful laptop for CAD and scouting purposes. This Asus fit the bill. We're pretty happy with it, as it has good battery life and performs really well.
(1) Custom CAD workstation
Purpose: CAD/Compute-intensive tasks
Specs: AMD FX8350 4GHz, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro 600, Windows 7, Corsair RM750 PSU, NZXT Source 210, 500GB HDD, Hyper 212 EVO
, Dell P2414H and E2414H monitors
Story: We quickly realized that we needed a CAD workstation for rendering and such. I was tasked with designing a system to do so. I largely based it off my system at home, with a few modifications. We went with the AMD FX8350 for it's great performance at a low price point and it's high clock speed and 16GB of RAM for CADing and rendering. We have a Hyper 212 EVO from Cooler Master to keep the AMD beast cool. The Quadro 600 was an interesting story. We wanted a workstation card mainly due to driver support in Solidworks, although we knew a new card would be out of reach. One of our students took the Quadro 600 out of his mom's old computer and gave it to us. While it is quite slow (it's a Fermi generation card) it does the job. The monitors were donated by our school because when we moved into our current building the previous owner (the school district) left them behind. We LOVE having dual monitors, as it means whoever's working can be looking at email, Google Drive, a product page, etc. while CADing. The hard drive came out of another one of our student's old MacBook Pro. The case we chose because it was the cheapest aesthetically pleasing case with a large-enough window. The PSU was chosen because we wanted fully modular (for a clean look) and capability to expand the system in the future. All-in-all, the system is a bit of a hodge-podge of parts but it works great for us and we did all our rendering on it this year. The computer, monitors, and peripherals now reside on a converted Harbor Freight workbench so the whole system can move wherever we need it to (see the image gallery for more detail).
Images with captions/more info:
http://imgur.com/a/j4CCX
Specs/Parts list (Google Doc with prices/links):
https://goo.gl/m0cfMC
Well, there is a list of the main computers we have. We have a few Raspberry Pis here and there that power things like our CheesyParts server but they aren't really worth including. While it may seem like we don't have many computers most of our students bring in personal computers and our school has 1:1 Chromebooks, many of which our students run Ubuntu on. Also, here is an imgur gallery with photos of our shop:
http://imgur.com/a/QTDsm.
As far as best or worst, I would say we're middle of the road. We could definitely use more power and computers (who can't!).
Please let me know by PM or posting if you have questions or comments!