Over the last year or so I have bought and configured four
Acer Aspire 1360 laptops for friends and family.
Found them to be good value laptops for the price, with lots of power, large keyboards and clear bright screens (the wide screen ones are particularly nice). They come preloaded and configured, the wireless ones work well with a standard wireless router (eg NetGear / Belkin).
These are not the most compact laptops and so if you will be carrying them around you may want to look at something smaller / lighter. The folk that I have bought them for are using them as home PCs and so portability isn't an issue.
Unfortunately one of the four laptops was delivered with a faulty DVD-RW drive. When I sent it back, it took Acer almost 4 weeks to return the laptop it as there had been a bad batch of DVD drives and so they had a backlog to source from their suppliers and reissue to customers.
RC