You get what you pay for (mostly).

I just wanted to do a follow up about my father's purchase of a new Dell notebook. I had tried to talk him into a Lenovo Ideapad but instead he bought the Dell due to the price difference. He was having some difficulty with his new Dell so he asked me to do some troubleshooting. His wireless connection was running slow and he couldn't get his printer to install. Both problems were due to Vista and IE issues and were easily fixed. He did explain that he called Dell for assistance and was turned away because he bought the system at Best Buy and would need to contact the Geek Squad. Geek Squad was very nice and offered to come over to fix his issues for a small fee of $149 or would do it remotely for $79. Dad was smart enough to turn the offer down and wait for me but who knows how much money people have wasted with them?

Since I was there I decided to poke around the Dell and compare it to the IdeaPad. The Dell is very thin and only had a slight heat issue to the left of the touch pad. The heat was not a major issue and was about equal to the Lenovo. The Windows Experience score was 3.1 which caught my attention since the IdeaPad scored 3.4. The WPrime score was 53 seconds compared to 43 seconds on the Lenovo. Poking around I found that the Dell had an Intel T2390 1.83 Ghz processor 2GB of RAM and the Intel R965 chip set. All in all the reason for the Dell being cheaper was attributed to the system using older and lesser equipment. I'm not so sure he is as happy with Dell knowing the extra $100 would have gotten him a much better system.