re: can you tell me if this desktop is decent

Sorry, totally missed the part in the original post where you mentioned his intended use.

The more expensive one is largely the same as the other one except for the video card. The more expensive machine has a sliiightly better performing video card based on older architecture. He should not buy that machine.

It's not a matter of whether the video card is bad or not. It's the fact that it's even there. It won't do him much good or bad. It's just adding to the cost. If he were buying it for gaming, it's garbage. If he were buying it for watching videos, it's unnecessary. The Intel integrated graphics would be fine.

I'm looking for better configurations on the best buy website.

This ASUS is superior in performance to the two lenovos:
LINK


I would consider this HP a very strong contender for its price. It has a pretty decent APU:
LINK

Likewise for this Dell:
LINK

I'll spare you the whole speech about SSDs, but if I were setting up a new system for my dad in this price range, I would have him purchase the Dell or the HP, along with this SSD. I'd add the SSD to the desktop, and use a free migration program to put the OS image to the SSD, boot to SSD, format the 1TB drive and use it as file storage. He would be very, very happy.