I´d say that machine is a little overpowered for her needs..
My laptop is an AMD XP1800+ with 256MB RAM ( 32MB shared with graphics card ) and that is more than sufficient for the above.. I don´t use it for much more than that, but sometimes I watch an occasional DVD or DivX movie ( while traveling ) on it, and the machine doesn´t have any problems with that...
To summarize; I would have told her to buy a cheaper one, with a little less performance..