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CAD thoughts
I am not a real designer, but I have made a lot of patent drawings and other illustrations. I have worked with low cost CAD (all the way back to the most primitive early PC CADs), Autosketch, and high cost CAD (Full Autocad). Over the years Turbocad Pro (get the mechanical full powered version) has gotten better and better. At this point the only things it will not do are the things I have not gotten smart enough about. It takes some adjusting to go from one CAD to another, but I particularly like the way Turbocad uses 2D shapes to make 3D shapes. Sometimes it seems a little fussy about having things in the exact plane to start with, but I have always been able to get it to work if I stick with it. For my purposes anyway, Turbocad is a lot more convenient for color and line types. Autocad still (last I looked several years ago) has that clumsy pen stuff, like it thinks we still are using ink pens on an XY plotter. But as I say, I am not a real designer.
I strongly recommend this Turbocad CAD because its creators have not gotten greedy and exclusive about things. (Autocad made it so you could bring a file from elsewhere and if you modified it you could not move it back. I thought that stunk. Even Autosketch has become expensive.)
I am having no trouble running this with an HP Pavilion, I think with 2GB memory. It is 2-3 years old and it looks like the equivalent is about $500 now. Monitors are so good, big, and cheap now so go for a big one. Five years ago I paid around $800 for a good monitor which I still use, but it looks like I could get a better one now for about $300.
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