I'm pretty happy with my old Acer Aspire from 2010, I don't use it that often but its held up nicely for the random times I've needed it.
Over the summer I went on a micro-vacation and I almost bought a newer Acer Aspire so that I could work remotely on it. I decided to save the thousand bucks and just use my old one. But I'd say its probably likely that in the next year when I find that I need a new laptop again that it is most likely that I will buy another Acer Aspire..
Good choice on Intel 4th gen (haswell) for the CPU. I have three separate systems in my home office which are based off the i7-4770k and even though Intel released the new i7 called Devil's Canyon a couple months back the 4th gen are still fast as hell and considerably cheaper (a 5% performance gain wasn't worth the upgrade price for the new Devil's Canyon).
The only problem though with Haswell (as well as its predecessor, Ivy Bridge) is the crap thermal grease on the CPU which results in higher temps (thus limiting their lifespan). So I highly recommend cracking open your new laptop and delidding it using either vice or razor methods which you can see here:
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=how+to+delid The new Devil's Canyon i7 do not have this issue, but its with delidding being so incredibly easy its also not worth the increase in price ($5 price difference between the two for the CPU, but the new Z97 motherboards cost a ~$100 more)
I don't have any opinion on Toshiba, but DELL = HELL. DELL is the only computer/laptop/tablet company that I say to avoid at all costs (OK, I also say that about crApple too).
Also, Windows 8.1 > Windows 8. This is both for the user interface (they fixed a lot of their windows 8 fails) as well as hardware performance (windows 8.1 = most performance). It's likely the laptop your looking at is Windows 8.1, but you might wanna be sure of that as it'll save you some time with having to do the updates manually (fortunately windows 8.1 is free for windows 8 users)...
