these computers are on sale for $250...are they worth this amount? i have consistently heard bad things about emachines?
Cheap parts and lousy tech support. You'd be better off spending the $250 on a gun and shooting yourself in the foot. It would be less painful than dealing with a eMachine computer.
I just recently rebuilt an eMachine that was just a year and a half old the motherboard went bad and they didn't even make the same board for it anymore the replacement was $150.00 and you couldn't even use the OS reinstall CD anymore. So I striped out the MB and the Celeron processor and replaced it with a Gigabyte MB and a AMD Sempron 3500 processor used the DDR ram off the board and fixed it for only $100. Thats about what you will face using eMachines.
I have worked on a few eMachines in my time, never encountered any problems with them from a hardware point of view.
Actually we have two of them where I work, one is about 6 years old running ME, the other about 2 years old running XP, they are still both going strong though.
Maybe it is the TLC they get from me.
All that I have done with them from a hardware point of view is install more memory, that was only due to the fact that we run some quite memory intensive software on them.
I think for $250 you could do a lot worse.
thx for the feedback...i purchased an hp a1600n for $500 (less $50 mail-in rebate)
Looks like a nice one.
Remember the first thing you do when you get it is update windows, uninstall all the crap software it comes with, and then install security software.
These should help with that:
http://forum.ccleaner.com/index.php?showtopic=7936
http://forum.ccleaner.com/index.php?showtopic=6329
Oh and this might help too.
My fiance computer is w3503 and it had some problems fresh out of the box. I reinstalled the OS and dropped in some more memory and now it works fine. I'm gonna be adding more ram put in a agp 8x vid card in it and replace the celeron d with a pentium d. Her machine will be done after that.these computers are on sale for $250...are they worth this amount? i have consistently heard bad things about emachines?