well there's not much to compare... the only 2 differences is the CPU's and screen size.
for $700+ all your getting out of the higher priced one is about 200MHz and 2 inches more screen size (and slight resolution increase too)
its up to you if you want to shell out $700 for a mere 200Mhz increase in CPU performance.
if playing at near 1080 resolution is something you want the 2nd one will be capable of that, but if running in 720 is good enough, the 1st one will be capable of that.
why their configured with XP is beyond me, if its XP 32-bit, the systems are configured with 4GB of RAM + 512MB GPU memory + all the cache memory from the CPU, HDD etc, you'll only have between 3 & 3.5GB of usuable RAM then.
honestly if it were me and shelling out 2 grand for a laptop, especially configured like that I'd be looking into running Vista 64 bit, or at least considering downloading and running Windows 7 RC 64-bit.