Emachines. Are they good computers?

[kirinke]

The other compy i'm looking at in it's price bracket are the HP's. they run around 500-600 dollars. Plus, the emachine i'm looking at has a coupla expandable slots and slots for expanding the ram memory and plain hardrive memory. soooo i'm really looking at it seriously. And with the hp's, I can always get a better vid card. otherwise, they're fairly comparable.

the games i'm looking at are around the area of Neverwinter etc.....

 

[KenM]

I have an HP now, no problems with that computer either. I think with Emachine I got lucky in I got a model with a real video card and not onboard video, so I was able to upgrade the card, ect.. I think you should definatly get a model with an upgradible video card, save yourself some headaches.

 

[kirinke]

mmm. i think that emachine i'm looking at does have an upgradable vid card. i mean, the nvidi g-force isn't exactly a built-in you know? but the reason why i'm looking at it is it has a very nice little vid card already installed, so i don't have to muck with it for awhile.

 

[Pielorinho]

My own experience:

Last August, I bought an e-machine from Circuit City, based on the following:
* Circuit City has a beautiful no-questions-asked return policy.
* The e-machine gave me the most bang for my buck, compared to the other prefabs at CC.
* My experiences building my own machines have been less than pleasant: I'm only middling-good with computers, and building your own machine can be a magnificent hassle.
* The e-machine's on-board video card sucked, but it had an AGP slot into which I could install my own GeForce card.

So I get it home, and try to install my video card. No luck: the machine absolutely won't recognize it.

So I read the motherboard's instructions on how to change the BIOS: it tells me to go into the BIOS and change default video from on-board to AGP. Problem is, there's no such setting in the BIOS.

So I go online and research, and discover that this is a common problem folks have, and you have to flash your bios with an upgrade in order to get the setting that the computer's manual tells you to use. I do that and get the setting. It still doesn't work.

So I get on the phone with tech support, who assume I'm an idiot and tell me to do things like disable video from device manager. Uh, hello? I just told you that I'd already done that, you fool! Then they tell me to change settings in device manager that don't exist. And they argue with me when I describe to them the screen I'm looking at, so certain are they that I must be seeing something else. I have this same conversation (with minor variations) several times by phone and by email, in which they ignore what i've told them I've tried and just give me the same obvious and/or useless advice repeatedly.

Finally they tell me to make a setting change that completely disables video, such that I'm not able to even see the initial bootup screen. Another call to support later, they tell me that I can remove the computer's battery for an hour to reset all settings. I do that. And I write a very angry letter to tech support telling them that if I can't get some useful advice within 48 hours, I'm returning their computer to the store and spreading word about how horrible their computers are.

Four days later, nary a word from tech support (except for an automated email promising a response within 24 hours), I return the computer to the store and buy a Hewlett Packard.

Three weeks later, tech support writes me a letter telling me that because I'd installed a different operating system on the computer, they weren't obligated to help me with my problem, but good luck, and thanks for choosing e-machines!

My HP has worked beautifully. I did have a problem a few months ago when I upgraded my video card, but the problem was my own fault this time, and a single call to the video card manufacturer's tech support sorted everything out very quickly.

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND AGAINST E-MACHINES! I have never had so much trouble doing a basic customization on a computer, and other than BellSouth (a whole other saga), I have never had such a lousy experience with tech support.

Daniel

 

[Silvanos]

CPU: AMD Athlon™ XP 3000+ Processor
QuantiSpeed™ Architecture operates at 2.167 GHz
512KB L2 cache & 333MHz FSB
Operating System: Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition
Chipset: NVIDIA® nForce™2
Memory: 512 MB DDR (PC 2700)
Hard Drive: 160 GB HDD
Optical Drives: 48x Max. CD-RW Drive; 16x Max. DVD Drive; 3.5" 1.44MB FDD; 8-in-1 Media Reader(USB 2.0, Secure Digital (SD), Smart Media, Compact Flash, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, Micro Drive, Multimedia Card)
Video: NVIDIA® GeForce4™ MX graphics (1 AGP 8x slot available)
Sound: nForce™ 6-channel Audio
Modem: 56K* ITU v.92 ready Fax/Modem
Network: 10/100Mbps built-in Ethernet
Peripherals: Premium Plus Multimedia Keyboard, 2-Button Wheel Mouse, Amplified Stereo Speakers
Dimensions: 7.25"w x 14.125"h x 16"d
Internet: AOL 3 month membership included, click here for details
Ports/Other: 5 USB 2.0 ports (4 in back; 1 in Media Reader), 1 Serial, 1 Parallel, 2 PS/2, Audio-In & Out
Pre-Installed Software: Microsoft Works 7.0, Microsoft Money 2004, Encarta Online, Adobe® Acrobat® Reader™, Microsoft Media Player, Real Player, Power DVD, Internet Explorer, Netscape® Navigator, MSN®, CompuServe®, AOL (with 3 months membership included**), Norton AntiVirus 2004 (90 day complimentary subscription)


That is the system specs for those who are following this...

Ok. So the it is a GF4 MX... Here is some info on that POS from TOM's Hardware site:

When you look at the three different GeForce4 MX offerings, it is easy to see that the low-end version, the GeForce4 MX420, will be a product for OEMs only. Its 166 MHz SDRAM memory will slow down the performance of the GeForce4 MX chip so much that it will hardly perform any better than previous GeForce2 MX400 cards that you can get for a mere 50 bucks.

The performance of the GeForce4 MX440 and 460 cards, however, proved to be very impressive. Especially the GeForce4 MX460, which is able to score results as high as those of the GeForce3 Ti200, or even the Ti500 cards. Both are able to beat ATi's Radeon 7500 in most cases.

Still, none of the GeForce4 MX cards has full DirectX 8.x support, because of its lack of vertex and pixel shaders. This weighs heavily when you remember the lowest priced offering out of the GeForce4 Ti bunch of cards. It's only $20 more than GeForce4 MX460.

I therefore suggest the GeForce4 MX440 for value buyers, but they should try to get the price down to less than $149. Better yet, a value buyer should watch out for GeForce3 cards. Any GeForce3 card that costs less than $190 is a bargain right now. GeForce3 comes with full DirectX 8.x functionality, vertex/pixel shaders and lots of 3D power! If you can chose between a GeForce3 card and a GeForce4 MX card for similar prices, I would clearly go for the GeForce3!



That is what I was talking about. Your paying for a premium card, that says GF 4 on it. So it must be better than the other ones right? Same speed as the GF2?!? Better off buying the GF3?!?

Just realize what you are getting. And that review was posted on February 6, 2002! 2 years ago! Your not getting a Game useable card there. And you WILL Have to replace it to Play NWN's and such games at any resolution above 800x640.

Drew

Drew

 

[Breakdaddy]

I most definitely would NOT go emachine. As a computer repair tech for several years before my current job (server admin) I had several run-ins with emachines. They are generally poorly built, undercooled, and made of poor quality parts. Im disinclined to believe this has changed lately, but I could be proven wrong. When I had to deal with them, they generally had very limited upgrade paths (unable to support much additional ram, higher clock speed procs, and with limited AGP support (most were 1x when the standard was 4x)). Build your own if possible. If not, go fishing for good deals from Dell. Usually on their homepage you will find better deals than you might think with free or low-cost upgrade paths. If you have the knowledge, building your own can be rewarding. I recently upgraded mine, and am playing Farcry on it. WOW! What a beautiful game. Plays great on my machine. These are the specs:
AMD Athlon 3200XP+
512 Megs Corsair pc3200 (dual channel)
ATI Radeon 9800XT 256meg
Nvidia Soundstorm 5.1 onboard sound
Klipsch Promedia 5.1 surround speakers (the 500 watters, not the 150's)
Asus A7N8X-E 400 MHZ FSB Mobo
1 200 Gig 8 MB Cache Western Digital HDD
1 120 Gig 2 MB Cache Western Digital HDD
Plextor 52x CD Burner
Pioneer 8X DVD Burner
Windows XP Professional Edition
Gigabit Ethernet Networking

 

[Pielorinho]

That is what I was talking about. Your paying for a premium card, that says GF 4 on it. So it must be better than the other ones right? Same speed as the GF2?!? Better off buying the GF3?!?

Just realize what you are getting. And that review was posted on February 6, 2002! 2 years ago! Your not getting a Game useable card there. And you WILL Have to replace it to Play NWN's and such games at any resolution above 800x640.

Just to add to this -- in 2003 when I got my HP machine, it had a GeForce 4MX in it, and that's the card I had to replace in February. Upgrading to a slightly-behind-the-curve GeForce 5600 Ultra set me back an additional $119, but at that point, a game I really wanted to play (Prince of Persia) was unplayable on the 4MX.

That game uberly rocks, by the way, probably the most fun I've had playing a computer game since my first multiplayer experience back in 1995. Don't buy a computer that can't play it .

Daniel

 

[Silvanos]

I just saw in an unrelated story, that Gateway purchased Korean Based Emachines in January.

Apperently they are getting sued by HP for patent infringment now.

 

[drothgery]

If you don't have the inclination to build things yourself (and I don't), my advice has been to stick with Dell (though you may want to pretend to be a small business). Which is why my third Dell desktop will be showing up at my apartment on Monday. Five years without problems on the first one. Three and a half so far on this one. And buying roughly the same components from NewEgg (875P motherboard, P4 3.2, etc., legal copy of an OS, etc.) wouldn't have saved me a significant amount money.

That, and every other major hardware vendor's web site seems to be designed to make it difficult to customize your box.