I was wondering how many teams this past year decided to use a different machine to house their diver station software, and what your input would be for those looking to possibly do so this year.
Get as many built-in USB ports as you can.
Avoid Windows 7 Starter (but it will work okay with some tinkering).
I can remember us having to do this at WPI because our classmate overheated and wouldn’t reboot. So we found a students netbook and used that for the rest of the regional and it worked fine.
Just any decent and stable machine. Doesn’t over heat, lots of USB, enough CPU for vision processing if you need it. For example we just had camera lag, just by viewing on the Netbook, while on a i5 laptop it played back fine.
There is one extremely rare bug, if you use a non-classmate computer, that did not get discovered until our team went to the Mainely SPIRIT event this past September. Rare, in that it involves (1) a non-classmate computer with the driver station software installed; (2) the off-season FMS (though, come to think of it, maybe not); and (3) the (approximately) 39 teams that are numbered in the 1100s. Until it was proved at Maine (using the Field Management team doing debugging – thanks everyone! – and multiple borrowed laptops), we were convinced it was our Dells that were a problem. It turns out that for whatever reason any 192.11.yy.zz connections were ignored by the FMS.
Otherwise, I’m sure any machine that can take the DS software will work. 
We had forgotten our classmate when we went to an offseason event. So, we used a student’s laptop for practice. One thing to note is that the laptop will not connect to FMS unless the profile running on the laptop is named “Driver” (Or so we were told…)
Anything beginning with 192 is going to be ignored, and quite properly so. The FRC control system uses IP addresses in the 10.xx.yy.zz range.
Where, of course xx.yy is your team number (for me, 11.24) and zz is .05 (for the driver station)
My mistake. As I said there were FMS experts working on this and they tracked it down.
Until I hear differently, that classmate is our driver station.
Read reviews about connecting to networks if your getting a new laptop.
I installed the driver station on my personal laptop(HP Pavilion dv5) for Smokey Mountain and ran into some network connection issues. However, it wasn’t the program faults but the junk hardware that HP installed.
Dont forget that coding is light on the processor(I know many a team who code solely on their classmates). Battery life and USB ports are far more important, and your drivers would surely appreciate a large screen.
Thanks everyone, this is great information.