Last PC i bought was a Dell. It had 2 gigs of ram and a pentium 4 processor in it. It only had another slot of ram i could install. At the time it was hard to find anything over 2.1 ghz. It was ok but even working different programs, Open office, it would even slow down the printer. My next computer i bought the parts and built it myself, never looked back. I went with AMD and used a 2.5 duel core and 4 gigs of ram. It left the dell in the dust! I never looked back again. There are amd folks and intel folks but that was the last one i ever owned. I used it almost 10 years! When the board went i upgraded and i have a quad core model now. This one is way fast over the duel core i had. And i went to 8 gigs of ram. Still running it now. I finally wore out the duel core and used it in a MSI board that Celery had. I used it a few months and found teh equipment i have in this one now. The only thing was the older GPU was slow. I got the one i have now and still runs great for whatever i need.
Now, he may be ok with the Dell, but i would have gone with a build it myself computer. Just my two cents