I'm going to get a laptop mostly for running AutoCAD, and school in general. I have 0 experience with laptops in general. Basically wanting to know what brands are good, and what to stay away from.
Is there a reason it needs to be a laptop? I've always found a desktop to be better suited for CAD. You want a hot graphics card and as much RAM as you can shoehorn in. It may not be so bad now, as all the pointing devices are running USB, but a good mouse is the bare minimum. The last Dell I bought was in 1987. Not that there's anything wrong with them now, but they use a non-standard pinout on the power supply, so if you try to change either that or the motherboard, you let the smoke out.
The issue is that currently I can only do my drawings at home. I have to housesit my Moms house next week and I need to be able to do my drawings over there. I got a free student version of CAD and I can only install it on one computer, my home computer. So, besides a laptop I have to get the program also. My Moms computer does not have powerful enough graphics to run CAD. I need something with duo core processors, at least 4 gigs of ram, and dedicated graphics.
I could not imagine doing my drawings on a laptop. The screen is aay to small. To run ACad efficiently I have found I need 2 monitors one being at least 24". 4 gig of ram will be ok just don't multi task. The home video cards are also not optimized for cad rendering and can be painful and cause Artifacting