If your friend is using 32-bit Windows system, please only install up to 4GB RAM, as 32-bit systems can only support up to that size of RAM.
If your friend uses 64-bit system, its recommended to install up to 6GB ram also if he only want to play vanilla Minecraft without any high resolution texture pack. (as latest vanilla Minecraft version's minimum required memory size usage is NOW 2GB, thought the recommended spces stated that you should get at least 4GB of RAM)
And there is one thing you MUST know about, is that by default, 32-bit Windows system itself will use 1GB of RAM, while 64-bit Windows systems will use 2GB of RAM just for the system itself. So if you got the 64-bit Windows installed on the laptop it's recommended to upgrade the RAM as much as the chipset itself can support.
So according to the recommended requirement of the game, your GPU is enough to run the game (as it stated that it need at least GeForce 200 series to achieve the recommended requirement), but you need to upgrade your CPU as the minimum required CPU to run the game are either Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 (K8) that both need to have at least 2.6 GHz. I recommended you to install an Intel Core i3 processor that have at least 2.8 GHz, since to me Intel is more better than AMD's processors.
Here's a link for official requirement page:
https://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/articles/325948-minecraft-system-requirements