Well first of all the "best" distros in many people's opinions are DIY ones like Arch or Gentoo and for older hardware it's minimal distros which have learning curves of their own so such lists would probably be bad for beginners.
Anyways your hardware isn't too slow so any distro should be usable I think. Choose one that is well known and that has a desktop environment (UI) you think your wife (congrats on having one btw) would like. If you have no idea, just go for the Cinnamon version of Linux Mint. Its UI is very much similar to Windows and it's as easy to use as it gets.
If you're feeling brave, you can try a distro with vanilla (not customized as hell) GNOME environment like Fedora. It's unique and known for not having any features by default lol so it's very easy once you get a hang of it. The UI is the most similar to Android than anything I'd say.
EDIT: any modern OS will be pretty slow if it's installed on an HDD (spinning hard drive). If you have that, I'd highly recommend upgrading to a cheap SSD. The difference will be night and day, especially in boot times.