My younger brother is in need of a laptop for school and he has roughly $700 to spend. It will be used for programs like AutoCAD as he is taking Landscape Architecture courses.
That should fit the bill. I'd suggest changing the RAM out with something faster as the APU gains performance from it, but that shouldn't matter if no gaming is involved (though it is capable)
Do you think this one would be better than the Toshiba you mentioned? I don't know very much about AMD's APU's versus Intel's 2nd gen Core laptop processors.
Well the APU is a CPU and GPU in one, basically an athlon ii quad and a 6670 GPU. Very capable of gaming and graphics processing. The sandy bridge integrated video isn't all that great.