OT: Laptop Reco

I was always a dell guy,  but we got my kid an HP through his college and it had an issue under warranty and they were pretty damn good to work with.  They next day aired us a packaging kit,  we sent it in,  and about 3 days later we got it back good as new and it didnt cost us a dime.  A lot of companies would have made us pay the shipping at least one way.

Honestly,  I tell my customers that need a laptop to just go buy a mid priced model from walmart ( or discount chain of your choice)  I know we have a very lovely poster here with a strong tie to best buy,  perhaps repaying her generosity would be a nice gesture? (she has given us her parking pass for the VFans tailgate parties at the new stadium and has always made her group open to others for any game),  it wont be anything super special for gamers or business class,  but very few people ever scratch the surface of what their computers can actually do so for what she is doing a 5-600 dollar unit would likely meet her needs for a long time.

@"purplefaithful" said: Wife is going to want a laptop - windows based as much as I want her to go MacBook...

Office Products (i.e. Word, Excel, PPT)
Email
Social Media

Not a gamer so we dont need crazy graphics

I dont want to over or under-build this for her.

Suggestions?

Brand
Ram/Rom
Disc type/size/speed

THX

Tiger direct has some good deals on refurbs.  Bought a bunch of Dell Precisions that are very nice.  They are power workstations, not geared towards being light but come with SSD drives and plenty of RAM for 600-800.
newegg has been a crap shoot for quality.  Tiger seems much more consistent.

Want to highlight the SSD option.  The slower SATA drives are the bottleneck of a computer.  Many laptops had 5400 RPM drives and this is just to slow for a modern computer.  Very impressed with these Dell Precisions and the 512GB SSD drives.