E-Machines Improving?

[blubomber]

it seems that from the articles i have seen that e-machines are staying on the cutting edge of technology with their AMD 64bit desktops and laptops.

but is the quality of their product improving to where you would recommend them to someone? Or if some one told you they just bought and e-machine, would your heart fill with sympathy for the path that person has just chosen?

Just curious.

[phenious]

Well with all the e-machines i have seen they can range in hardware. A lot of them take short cuts by using slower Hard Drive RPMs or slower DDR RAM and such. After that its like any other system manufacturer who loads tons of stuff on start up. In General if you take any computer, format it and install what you want and need it will run faster. If the person knows what they are doing I can easily see buying an e-machine and then formating it and doing it from scratch, if its just somone who needed a computer and bought the cheap one I would feel sorry for them.

-: phenious :-

[John Prophet]

If they are improving...they have a long way to go, lol.

But for an average computer user as long as it doesnt break down its probably ok.

and I speak from experience, I worked at a comp shop that sold them...in 2001ish etc...they were celeron 766s I think. We had all sorts of issues with them....at one point I finally told my boss "uhh, these emachiens arent exactly helping our reputation"..he acted as if he was surprised but he knew we got like 2 out of 5 of them back for problems, lol. (he didnt care about the customers issues though, he only cared about the bottomline....he is out of business now...hehe)

JP

[RayH]

They are now owned by Gateway. But before being sold to Gateway, a corporate turnaround expert took the helm and improved quality!

[The Real Bingo]

I have an E-Machines and before XP Pro was installed it would crash totally [meaning the setup discs were needed] pretty frequently. The last time it crashed the discs wouldnt work so a buddy of mine installed XP Pro and it worked fine.

As far as physical quality, there's a fan on it that makes a whole lot of noise when it starts up [I have to hit the computer a certain way for it to stop]. I guess it's just like any pre-built computer: Small case, cheap components to save money, but they still charge you more than its worth.

[jman01pa]

Originally posted by RayH
They are now owned by Gateway. But before being sold to Gateway, a corporate turnaround expert took the helm and improved quality!

Wow. I didnt know this. I am no big fan of Gateway but respected them more than the EMachine of yesterday.

[blubomber]

Well, i am really hoping that gateway wont mess up e-machines by taking away the AMD line of computers. that would really stink!

[elroy]

Back in the days when 600 and 700 mhz machines were fairly new I had several eMachines and a dozen HP's. The 2 brands were very similar except the HP's had junk 4500rpm Quantum hard drives that all died. The eMachines were made mostly out of Samsung components, which held up well. They both had Tri-gem motherboards. Between the two I would take an eMachine.

[ArcticFox]

Emachines was horrible and always will be. The skimp everywhere they can, and the general build quality sucks. But many people that buy them don't know this, they just think it's an awesome deal on a PC sitting next to an identical one selling for $400-500 more, and they buy it. I know because I was in the same situation a few years ago - bought a Celeron 466 machine with a 4GB drive and 32MB RAM.

I reformatted about twice per month out of necessity, and one time I set a record and was forced to reformat 3 times in one day before it would work right. Can anyone top that?

The system came with Win98se, a restore disc with a bunch of crap I have to delete every time I reinstalled. Mobo was a 2-PCI/2-ISA slot job, the HSF was cheap and started to make a slight grinding sound later on in it's years. Eventually the modem began going out, and I had an issue where it wouldn't dial-up without having 2 copies of the modem installed and use the second one. Now it fails to work completely, but I have DSL anyways. (I won't buy another Connexant modem again if I'm setting up someone with 56k.)

My freind's mom also bought him an eMachines, against my strong word that I highly recommend going with someone else. Then they did the unthinkable and bought a second one for his brother. To shorten up a story, that rig caused him much trouble and eventually built his own P4 2.4c machine under my watchful eye. The brother, however, still uses his, but planted a GF4 MX (eww) in it, even though all he does is get up in the morning and play D2 until dusk.

Mark my words, stay away from them.

[bombledmonk]

I'll look for the report, but I read somewhere that emachines had the highest reliability rate last year along with some of the best service. I've had an Emachine for 5 years now and the only thing that has gone bad is the Maxtor Hard Drive.