eMachines eTower T1400 Desktop (Athlon XP 1600+, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive)

Rating:
Summary: If you get one that works it would be a good deal
Review: I had my reservations about buying an eMachine, they have a terrible reputation for both quality and customer service. Unfortunately, I went against my better judgement and decided to buy the T1400. It seems like a good PC for the money and it is as long as there are no problems. Within a month ours started to randomly reset without warning, it didn't matter what you were doinf it would just reset. I called eMachines and they sent out a new power supply (apparently a bad power supply is a common problem with eMachines...). After the new power supply was installed the same problems started again, the resetting has become worse and we have progressed to the point where it will turn off and won't restart for at least 30 minutes. Emachines will repair it under their warranty but I have been told it would take anywhere between 5 weeks (the eMachine estimate) to at least 10 weeks (employees at both Circuit City and CompUSA told me to expect a long wait of at least ten weeks...). Now I will not have a PC for at least five weeks... I think I'll send it in for repairs and sell it when it comes back. I'll never again buy an eMachine, don't trust anyone who tells you they're better than their past reputation.

Rating:
Summary: Dandy Little Computer
Review: I ran into many initial problems with this computer. It would freeze sporadically as well as consistently under certain circumstances. For instance, I could not use the sound card while dialing into the Internet. When I say freeze, I mean it totally freezes. No errors, but the display won't update, neither the keyboard or mouse functions, sound ceases, etc. Have to turn it off and back on. The initial reaction I have is the motherboard is bad. After all, I had bought it open-box at a local retain store, and so it must have been returned for the same reason, right?

So I go to return it, describe the problems, and wouldn't you know it, it works fine, even through the modem-sound conflict. I was told the problems I was encountering are because "Office 97 and Windows XP Home aren't compatible." I've been computing for 14 years, programming for 6, and know that's not the problem. I'm told to run System Restore (heard that before, heh) and that of course doesn't improve things any. Therefore, matters were taken into my own hands.

XP is taken off. Windows 2000 [Pro] is the OS for people like me. Buy it before MS removes it from the market place ($... on Amazon, provided you have a relatively recent version of Windows), it's the best version of Windows Microsoft has ever made, as far as I'm concerned. I won't go into details of other software, as it's irrelevant. As I could afford it, other changes followed. The onboard video [is weak], so an AGP Radeon 7000 (64MB) (Sixty-four bucks here on Amazon, you can't go wrong) found its way into the system. Next, another 256 MB of PC133 RAM for forty-bucks came in. There were other upgrades, but these two brought performance up to par with a similarly configured P4-1.8 GHz system. The Athlon wins at some things, the P4 at others.

I wouldn't recommend a system like this to just anybody. Most of these upgrades (not my choices particularly, but _something_) are really necessary for this system to perform. Moreover, most users wouldn't be comfortable performing them.

The other big limitation is the lack of expandability. It has 3 PCI slots and 1 AGP. There's only 1 free drive bay. I maxed out all the internal expansion opportunities to a point where I had to remove the modem and rely on Internet access shared by another computer. The system also has a limit of 512 MB RAM.

As for my problem with the system freezing, it declined significantly in moving from Windows XP to Windows 2000, and further when I began using the "Hibernate" feature in Windows. I won't go into details of how Hibernate works, but if I can boot my system faster and it's more reliable, well, where's the down side?