Free or Inexpensive CAD program

[HighFrequency]

I'm looking for a CAD program for the company I work for. It will be used for drawing mechanical enclosures and boxes for various electronic circuits and systems. It does not need to do PCB layouts or circuit schematics. I have found a few on the web, but I was wondering if anyone has any experience with these.

Something in the range of $0 - $500 would be ideal.

Thanks guys

[philba]

I have used cadstd - http://www.cadstd.com/ for mechanical. It works ok and is a pretty good deal for free.

I also own turbocad (<$100) and have mixed feelings about it. On one had, it seems fairly full featured but has some maddening quirks and it's a big, complex user interface. TC has a library of standard symbols which inlcudes many electrical ones though i can't say, one way of the other, how good they are.

[dr_when]

I have used DesignCad now being sold by IMSI for over ten years.
Cheap, capable but steep learning curve.

[HighFrequency]

Thanks for the tips guys. I found one called A9CAD, which is freeware. I only used it for about 3 minutes last night, but it seems pretty good. I'll give it a good going over and see how it is.

I'll look at the ones you guys mentioned as well.

[Engineer1138]

I started evaluating Q-CAD a few months ago and then forgot about it when I moved. It looked pretty good and the registration fee is only $29