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Buddy of mine has a 2400+ E-Machine. He was wanting a better video card so for letting me use his garage to do my motor swap and shit i gave him my old Radeon 8500. Cracked open the case and well there wasn't nothing in it... lol 3 pci slots and an AGP and all were open. has 512 megs of ram and a 80 gig HDD. onboard video and audio. Slapped in the 8500 tweaked the bios a bit and off we were. He was amazed at how much better games looked in 3D lol. Had some S3 onboard crap before that just wouldn't play games at all. He's been playing bf1942 and medal of honor on this thing. how i don't know cause it was choppy as hell. Once i got the driver loaded fired up most of his games reset all of the gfx options and it ran really well.

i'd still rather handbuild. i'll never buy OEM again.

my computer is completely un-upgradable cause it's OEM. and i need more memory...

I dont think Predator is suggesting we should stop building our own boxes and buy E Machines. It is good that someone out there is building something at least decent for those who are not into building their own tho. I have worked on a couple of them and for what they were (very cheap PC) they were not bad to work on. One of my neighbors picked one up for $175 after rebates and that was everything including a monitor and all peripherals and a printer.

my sister has a e-machine model 1100 and it is a total garbage when it comes to adding anything other then one stick of ram to it !
there just was no slots and i tryed adding a hard drive - that was a joke - i even had to drill holes for the mounting screws to mount the new drive in the case in a bay - then found the units bios were to cheap to take the upgrade
and the power supply that was a whole nother story !
they have just enought power to run -what is supplyed by the factory . not one extra power plug to even add a case fan or anything !

The problem with e-machines is that they cut a LOT of corners. Cheap components. Maybe you get lucky and it runs fine for 3 years - then again maybe not.

Originally posted by FlyingPenguin
The problem with e-machines is that they cut a LOT of corners. Cheap components. Maybe you get lucky and it runs fine for 3 years - then again maybe not.

has anyohe here had the same computer for more that 3 years ?

I bought my Mom and Dad an Emachine a while back..
IT had a 466 mhz Celeron, 32 mb ram and a 4gb hd.
running Windows ME.
I bumped the ram to 256, and added a 10gb hd and a PCI ATI 7000. IT is still running. Granted they are not PCabusers. but she does the net, makes cards, and dad uses it for Excell. Also mom plays the Sims and Roller Coaster tycoon on it.
I only payed 300.00 after rebates and I had a monitor. It has never gave me any trouble.
I agree that Emachine also has started making alot better PCs.

has anyone here had the same computer for more that 3 years?

No one HERE would buy an Emachine with an on-board video card in the first place.

Emachines are for the regular public and the public expects to have a computer last 4 - 5 years. Not an unreasonable expectation if all you use it for is browsing, email, and typing the occasional letter.

Trouble is I see EMachines dying in their first or second year VERY often. Usually due to power supply or mobo failure. Emachines used to be notorious for cheap PSUs. They've gotten better (only because cheap PSUs have gotten better).

There's really nothing wrong with an Emachine as a budget consumer system (I'm certainly no fan of HP or Compaq either) except that when you open it up it's got CHEAP written over EVERYTHING (as opposed to just a few things). For instance you pretty much expect a floppy drive to run forever - or at least for the forseeable lifespan of a computer (5 years) yet I hate to tell you how many EMachine floppy drives I've replaced. You have to work pretty damn hard to find a floppy drive that fails that easily.

Originally posted by smb
has anyohe here had the same computer for more that 3 years ?

I have.

Not this computer, but the one before it.

This comp is coming in at 1.5 years so far.

Originally posted by smb
has anyohe here had the same computer for more that 3 years ?

LOL - Mine is going on 3+ years. I'm using a cheap Acorp P3 dual motherboard. I only have a single P3-1GHz cpu in it because I'm still running Win98, and have 512 megs of ram - the limit with this chipset. The same Win98 installation from 4 years ago. I upgrade parts as needed, but the mobo I usually keep for at least 3 years, including the video card. Hell, I'm still using my Geforce 2 GTS 32 meg video card.