my sisters are looking for a replacement for their old laptop because this one's hinges broke

requirements:
-good battery life
-less than $400
-a good amount of USB ports

also a cd/dvd drive would be nice but she's ok with getting an external one

the four i've come up with just from looking at reviews are three ASUS Eee PCs (1000HE, 1000HA, 1005HA) and the Acer Aspire One D250, they're all in the $350-$400 range and they all have better specs than the one they have now

any recommendations would be good or if one of those is particularly better than the others. she's also going to go to bestbuy or somewhere to see some of them

my mouse becomes unresponsive for a few seconds every couple minutes. sometimes it doesn't come back so i unplug it and plug it back in and that makes it work again... so uh.. i don't know anything about em and whether or not this is going to be a chronic thing, it's not really a huge problem but it's kind of annoying.

i have a razr diamondback and it's pretty old, maybe six years.
also plugged it into another usb port and this did not change anything

looked at google for a couple seconds and it said something about the cord but i do not understand why unplugging/replugging would work were that the case