Look for one with an intel pentium processor. AMD is the next best. Avoid a celeron processor. My daughter got a Lenovo touchscreen with windows 8 for graduation and I think it's a lemon. She has a lot of problems with blue screens on it. She also doesn't like windows 8. Dell still sells windows 7 computers.
I agree with getting as much RAM as you can. You can always use an external hard drive but adding RAM to a laptop isn't as easy.