ok, I'm going to allay some concerns here.
Circuit city, best buy, etc do not sell any new off the shelf systems that are insufficient for this task. Seriously, the whole "specs for a new college student" thing is blown WAY out of proportion. It's virtually impossible for you to fail here so you can relax. Last year, I gave away 4 P3 laptops on 512M of RAM for some college-bound people in my church and they've been absolutely sufficient. This is not to say to go hunting for secondhand stuff, but just realize, it'd be nigh impossible for you to goof this up.
However 2 things are very important, How fast can it be replaced/repaired in the event of a catastrophic failure, and is the student prepared for the inevitable catastrophic hard drive destruction that occurs 4 hours before a paper is due? a good flash drive and/or online synchronization service is a nice place to start. Anything with a "walk in get replacement with hard drive swap/data recovery service no questions asked" is recommended. Apples are pretty good on these 2 fronts tho a tad pricey. A personal printer is also nice to have...something laser-y tho an inkjet with at least 2 spare carts and 2 full reams of paper would suffice (every college has someone mooching someone else's printer stuffs).
Edit: I almost forgot, you should stick to machines running windows or OSX/Parallels + Office. There are many faculty members that craft tools based on the assumption of windows/MSOffice stack and this actually could make her life easier.
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