I had the Turtle Beach X12s for almost 3 years now but they crapped out on me just yesterday morning so I decided to go get a new headset. I really liked the x12s because of their sound quality but I don't have a basis of comparison. I would like to know how these turtle beaches sound quality...
Shade177 is right. Hard drives do bring the whole system down in laptops usually but if shes been using a laptop for 4-5 years without problems, it won't really make a difference.
The 8gb on the intel will be better at having many programs and files open at once and the graphics processor and cpu are no slouch either (unless shes playing video games or heavily using photoshop type programs).
Try going into control panel and finding Device Manager and checking if the keyboard is disabled for some reason. If it isn't, try updating the drivers for the keyboard using the Device Manager. Or you can unplug the keyboard and plug it back in or plug it into another port on the computer or...