Dell Vostro 1700 for $1,700 or Cheaper Alternative

My wife wants a notebook for work. She will only use it for email, Work, Excel, and Internet.

I priced out a very nice 17 inch Dell Vostro 1700 for $1,700.

Can I get away with spending a lot less and still take care of her needs. She would like a 17 in monitor and it needs to run smoothly without any slowness. I assume any new notebook will run fast enough though.

Any ideas?

It was decked out with a t7500, 2gm, upgraded video card and monitor, bluetooth, etc....

It was complete overkill. I just wasnt a speedy 17 incher for her to use Word, excel, internet, email, and and occasional movie.

Well, I now this post is a little old and if the onwer doesn't check out this deal I doubt that it is going to be there for long, I found a Vostro 1700 in the Dell Outlet (scratch and Dent) for less then a grand with almost identical stats. http://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlin [...] 1700&s=dfb
Its stats are:
Vostro 1700
Intel Core 2 Duo - 22GHz (T7500)
Genuine Windows Vista Home Basic
160 GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
3 GB DDR2 RAM
DVD/RW
256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT
Intel 4965 802.11a/g/n Dual-Band Mini Card
for $989.00

Like I said before, it will probably be gone by the time you read this (thats how high the demand is) but I used this as an example of what you can find in Dell Outlet.