Is she just gonna be using CAD? Some versions of CAD aren't that hard to run, trust me, if our school computers can run it, a 2000 dollar laptop can. But it all depends on how taxing of a program your gonna be using, she should talk to someone at the school or something, to see what all they'll be using. The computers at our school can even run Autodesk rivit and inventor. And just so you know, i think they're pentium 4's, maybe pentium d's(we may have recently gotten new ones), with like x600se's for graphics, and prolly no more than 512mb of ram, and they're dells by the way.