One big issue my wife has with laptops is sound, it is not that she uses it for music but needs enough volume to hear sound tracks of video clips on the net etc. Our current ACER has only one speaker (the left one) and I did not know this when we purchased it as it was not obvious from the specs however the rest of it is fine (it's an i5 M480) and it now runs Fedora 20 rather than W7 which is what it came with. So you see this is my problem and reading reviews you have no idea whether the people writing them were even interested in any sound when the give 4 or 5 stars. Another issue is screen colour rendition, my ACER is great but the HP one we tried was lousy when compared to it.
Just in case anyone wonders why we need a new one the ACER has a very intermittent bug which I've been trying to fix for probably 7 or 8 months now without success. Once I can get my wife something she is happy with I will spend some time stripping and rebuilding the ACER to see if I can sort it but right now my wife does not want me to make it worse
or to be without it while I try to fix it.
I'd love to be able to take her into somewhere so we could try them out but the Currys/PCWorld always are so reluctant to help (or of course dont know how to). The other issue is that there is always so much noise in these places trying to hear ones self talk is an issue so listening to a Laptop is a non-starter.
Stuart