Trying to find a solid all-purpose laptop for my wife - help!

She was with me all day. She is lost. She did, however, point out a few things that helped.

1) As mentioned, she said she must have a NUMPAD.
2) She said no to Macs. Wouldn't even go in the Apple store.
3) She doesn't want a "funky color"
4) And she didn't like the weird texturized finish on the lesser-expensive Dells.

We were mostly looking in the $500-$600 range. If that's a bad range, or too high, I can be convinced to look at some other ranges if someone things it's best.

Thanks!

Thanks for the info so far guys!

I found the "notes" I took while we were out today. While I take a closer look at your suggestions, I thought I'd post these to see if anyone had any thoughts:

1) Costco has an HP 15-N293CL on sale right now for $650. Touchscreen, i5 4200U, 12GB RAM (wow), 1TB HDD, 1366x768 display - $650
2) Costco also had on sale an Acer V5-573P-6486, Touchscreen, i5 4200U, 12GB RAM (wow), 1TB HDD, 1080 display - $650 (I am seeing these show up cheaper online, though they might be refurbs)
3) Best Buy had the Toshiba E55-A5114, i5 4200U, 6GB RAM, 750GB HDD, 1080 display, albeit sort of ugly, for $550.
4) Microcenter had the HP ProBook 4540s, i5 3230M (Ivy), 8GB, 75-GB, Radeon HD 7650M video, 1366x768 display, and Windows 7 + license for 8, for $580.
5) And lastly, Microcenter also had an ASUS K550LA-MS51T, i5 4200U, 6GB, 500GB HDD, 1366x768, for $550.

Wow.. saw a lot of i5 4200U's today.. didn't realize they were so popular. Aren't those just dual-cores? Anyways... if any of these are worth a darn, let me know what you think.

Hmm.. that link takes me to an empty page, unfortunately. :\

The G510 comes in a variant with an i5 4200M and 6GB of RAM. That has my interest right now.

I snagged a Lenovo Z510. I feel like we got a decent deal. I'll letcha know how it goes if interested. She really didn't like the aesthetics of the Thinkpad line.
Thanks for the suggestions.

Back to report on this laptop.

First, the ordering process:
The ordering process was grueling. Lenovo has some serious work to do to get with the times for ordering. Despite their website allowing me to purchase the laptop, and, giving me an estimate of 5-7 business days, the first order ended up going to some weird status, and finally, getting cancelled. Turns out that particular configuration was no longer being sold. They really need to align the ordering process and manufacturing process better.
Phone support was useless at this point, and email support never responded. I got the best support through, of all places, Twitter.

Anyways, a replacement order was placed a few days later, for a near-identical machine, but with a free upgrade to the i7 model. So that was nice. However, when the time came to ship it.... another delay. Sigh...

I called in again to express my lack of confidence that this thing would ever ship, and that it would just be continually delayed. They offered a 5% credit, so I decided to stick it out a little longer.

All in all, over a month later, we finally received the machine. Crazy that I can go down the street and have a new laptop in my hands in 30 minutes. This business model really needs to get with the times.


Second, the laptop:
First boot up walked us through a few setup items, and then we got to the machine. Lenovo loads it down with quite a few bloatware items. I disabled some stuff, and left some others in case my wife wants to check anything out later. I imagine it will all be removed eventually.

The boot-up time was slow. Slow enough that I was a little concerned. But it seems to be getting better, so maybe that was related to just the first couple boot-ups. Still not amazing, though.

Overall performance seems to be OK, and getting better as the indexing finishes and the bloatware settles down. We keep getting prompted to install some sort of Intel Manageability Recovery Agent thing, and I can't figure out how to make that go away yet, or if I should just bite the bullet and let it install.

I'm sure the bloat slows it down some, but I think the primary impact is from the HDD. There's a definite difference between that and the SSDs I have running on my desktop build.

I'd try to do a clean install, but, the laptop does not come with installation media. The hassle of figuring out the right version, praying the drivers I could find are correct and complete, and so forth, seems like a task I'd rather avoid unless I could find a really good guide specific to this machine.

The screen looks pretty good. It will take her some time to get used to the 1080 display on the 15.6" screen, I'm sure. I've showed her how to adjust the size of things so she can see them.

Internet and such has worked fine. She hasn't gotten around to Plants Vs. Zombies yet, but I suspect it will run well.

If anyone has any further questions about the laptop, let me know, and I'll be glad to answer. Thanks for the help that was provided.