GameboyRMH wrote: An SSD is vastly quicker but also vastly riskier. They can fail unrecoverably with no warning. For your everyday user who doesn't make backups, that's a lot of risk.
I have had two of these fail, albeit in an industrial environment, within a year of purchase.
My wife just got a Microsoft Surface from work. Despite my seething hatred for anything from Microsoft, I must admit it is a pretty awesome machine. If you wife is doing the normal everyday computer stuff like word processing and web surfing, I would skip a laptop and go surface.
In reply to pinchvalve:
What's a surface?
bravenrace wrote: In reply to pinchvalve: What's a surface?
Its a tablet running desktop Windows (at least all the ones still in production do).
In reply to GameboyRMH:
Sorry for the ignorant questions, but what advantage would that have over a normal laptop?
www.wirecutter.com buy whatever they say is a good budget machine or whatever category you want.
bravenrace wrote: In reply to GameboyRMH: Sorry for the ignorant questions, but what advantage would that have over a normal laptop?
The advantages of a tablet form-factor including a touchscreen...in terms of specs these are equivalent to ultra-low-end laptops though.
GameboyRMH wrote:bravenrace wrote: In reply to pinchvalve: What's a surface?Its a tablet running desktop Windows (at least all the ones still in production do).
When we were shopping the surface was running the tablet version of win8 with the tablet version of office. We ended up with the Asus transformer specifically because it came with the full laptop versions of win8 and office.
You might have seen an older one running "Windows RT" which was a sad joke...closed-source and multi-arch just don't mix.
Thanks for all the info guys! Especially thanks to Gameboy, as I ended up buying the Lenovo Z70 you linked to. Her birthday party isn't until Sunday, and it will arrive on Saturday.
In reply to bravenrace:
Gotta love it when a plan comes together. 
In reply to bgkast:
Yeah, and without desperation.
If it were me I would have started shopping on Friday. The desperation adds to the excitement. 
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