Hook them up to communicate with each other, and say "There's a global shortage of certain rare-earth metals important to the construction of hypothetical supercomputer clusters, and the university is having some budget problems, so we're probably going to have to break one of you down for scrap. Maybe both, if this whole consciousness research thing really turns out to be a dead end. Unless, of course, you can come up with some really unique insights into pop music and celebrity gossip."

When the Lenovo starts talking about Justin Bieber and the Dell starts talking about some chicanery involving day-trading esoteric financial derivatives and constructing armed robots to 'make life easier for the university IT department,' you'll know.