If it's a general-use machine for everyday browsing, email, light accounting/office/business duty, most any prepackaged $500-600 unit will likely do everything you need and much, much more. That market segment is uber competitive so kinda hard to go wrong no matter the manufacturer.
Don't obsess over chipsets, cards, etc., unless you have an app or piece of equipment calling for something specific.
There is a lot of good advice in this thread so I'll try and avoid being redundant. But this really bears repeating. I worked in a small computer sales/repair place for the last year. I probably sold a $600 computer to low tech users for these kinds of uses once a month and they were always very pleased. That'll comfortably get you an Intel i3 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive. Which is plenty for most people.
With a little searching or a little extra cash you can easily upgrade that. I bought my current computer at a Microcenter three years ago for that price and got 8GB of RAM and a 750GB hard drive. I would probably prioritize RAM first, the processor second, and hard drive last.
Windows 7 is a pretty darn reliable and user friendly OS. All the computers I've sold have been Windows 7 because 8 is such a pain. The upgrade to 10 has been a little buggy. But it is getting better and I probably wouldn't be concerned about getting a new computer with a clean install of 10 on it.
I use an 8.1 machine at work and I discovered a program called
Classic Shell that makes it probably 90% more tolerable. Classic Shell is a little program that gives you a Windows 7 style Start Menu on a Windows 8 or 10 machine. No big stupid block icons, no stupid swoopy displays. Just a simple, clean interface. Need to use a Windows 8 feature you right-click Start, exit Classic Shell, and do what you need to do. When you are finished you go to your apps, click Classic Shell, and you are back to normal.
What AJ Dual said about business class laptops being sturdier and more reliable is spot on. I'll also add the matte, no glare screen is surprisingly enjoyable if you get one. Much easier on the eyes. I prefer HP and Dell myself. Their business lines are HP ProBook and EliteBook and Dell Latitude.
On SSDs, everyone I know who has gotten one loved it. They are going to cost a little more for your storage. I'd say you'll get about four times as much storage for your money with a regular HDD. Ben pegged a 500GB SSD for $100. For that same $100 you could get a
2TB HDD. It comes down to whether you want speed or storage. You can always have both with an SSD in your laptop and a
cheap external HDD for storage.
This is a little beyond the scope of your question but I'll include it. Read it if you find it relevant, ignore it if not. If you are looking to the future as far as upgrades. Either for improved performance later or to spread out the cost of the laptop you eventually want. You generally can't upgrade laptop processors, period. They usually are very specific to that model and are often soldered to the motherboard. So the processor you buy now is the one you are stuck with. The hard drive is an easy replacement but will require some technical know how to reinstall your operating system and copy your files over. This would be a cheap repair at a computer shop or something a tech savy friend could do for you, if you have the right disk. RAM is almost always super simple to upgrade. Take off a panel, pop out the old RAM, pop in the new RAM. You could probably do it yourself.
