I guess the biggest thing to take into consideration would be how she would be using the laptop. If it will mostly be plugged in all the time I would aim for something with a powerful cpu. If you are looking for good battery life I would look for something with a less powerful cpu but more ram. Also one thing is if she has been using computers a lot in the past. My father is not too savvy with computers. He gets on to use email, youtube some projects, and basic looking up of some information. So when I helped set up a pc for him I put linux on it. Mostly because it had older hardware inside. Now he cannot stand windows. He had a new laptop with good specs and he found it much slower than the pentium 4 desktop with 512 with linux on it.