Shopping for IBM - Lenovo Desktop Computers

For the preconfigured E series, we picked something close to our preferred Standard Configuration. We weren't able, however, to add the Office Small Business suite. If you can somehow get it for the same $204.99 Lenovo charges to add it to the other models, the ThinkCentre E "Performance" model, listed at $799, still comes in at a lean $1,003.99 for our Standard Configuration.

Lenovo S50 ultra small

Lenovo — Power-User Desktop Computer

As you recall, the Power User's Office Desktop ups the processor to a 3.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent AMD; a full 1GB RAM; a 120GB or larger hard drive; a writable CD/DVD; and a slightly larger 19-inch LCD monitor; everything else is the same. Let's see what we can find.

AllBusiness.com Power-User Business Desktop Computer — Lenovo

The next step up from 80GB hard drives is 160GB, bigger than our suggested 120MB, so that's what we put on these models. The E50, interestingly, only offered Office Professional suite as an option, which is a couple hundred dollars more expensive than our recommended Office Small Business Edition. And as usual, the E50 "Express" model allowed no hardware component expansion, so we couldn't upgrade it from the 512MB of RAM, and no E preconfigured model offered more.

The economy model E50 is indeed the economy model here--by a hundred and fifty bucks. Its processor is slightly faster and its version of Office more capable, although it has less RAM.

As expected, the Power User configurations cost at least $500 more than our Standard configurations.