Gateway purchased eMachines a couple of years ago, so they’re actually the same company. I believe Ted Waitt stepped aside and the company is now run by the former head of eMachines.
But I agree with those who suggest a spyware problem with the PC. That’s the most likely cause of the sluggishness.
I bought an e-machine about 18 months ago. It had an onboard videocard that was crappy, but no problem–I already had a better video card I could install.
Six calls to tech support and four emails later, trawling through messageboards, flashing my BIOS with the proper version (an incorrect one came preinstalled), removing the battery to resolve the problems that tech-support got me to cause, I took the piece of crap back to the store and exchanged it for an HP machine.
Three weeks later, their tech support wrote me back to tell me that since I’d flashed the BIOS to the updated version, they could no longer help me with my problem, but they hoped I’d enjoy my e-Machine!
Daniel
I have an E-machine for my work computer. It is slow and cranky and just generally sucks. The worst thing is that this is my second one here at work. The first one was STOLEN! Yes, that’s right, some fool stole a freakin’ e-machine. Serves them right to have to deal with that crappy thing.
Then you’ll love it that I build my own. I build for my mom and my dad. I would build for my sister if she wasn’t such a freaking hard-head about it.
I fix computers for my family, people in my neighborhood, and anyone who’s owed a favor by parentsixes.
Oh, and my nick references Cat-6 the IEEE standard for network cable.
Completely satisfied eMachines owner here. Two years, zero complaints. But who knows, maybe I’m just lucky.
Well, as long as all the others they make are good, I guess that’s okay.
My Emachines is about two and a half years old, and I don’t have any regrets about buying it, but nowadays it is acting like it could use some extra RAM. Still, it’s better than the 486 machine it replaced, and way way better than the Apple IIs and Commodore 64s and Timex Sinclair 1000s that we used to have. Ah, the good old days, when RAM was measured in Kilobytes. Kids these days are spoiled rotten. Hrmmph.
How do I find the type of RAM his computer uses just by going through the software in XP? Is it under device manager because I can’t find any info on my computer listing what kind of RAM I use in mine.
Oh for…I used to sell computer cables for a living, and I never got that. :smack:
Yeah.
I guess I’ll have to increment to catseven if they ever get that standard done.
Originally posted by mhendo
I don’t buy that. When my ancient, 1995 NEC was hooked up with a dinky dial-up connection, I didn’t have those spyware problems. Now, I use an hp on the exact same DSL connection as my niece’s computer, and, look ma, no spyware! No slow run times, no waiting a year and a life for freakin’ Solitaire to open, no unwanted pop-ups in an IE window even when I don’t have IE running. I can’t help but believe that eMachines is the problem.
Well, perhaps you could then dispel my ignorance by explaining to me how the basic hardware components of your machine—isolated from any firewalls or relevant software—might contribute towards the number of spyware and virus infections you get?
I’m not saying it’s impossible. There might be a perfectly good explanation why the basic hardware could lead to such differences. But it’s going to take more than anecdotal evidence based on a sample of three computers to convince me.
My really poor aunt wanted to buy her kid a computer a few years back. It was when eMachines were THE thing. With all the rebates they were dirt cheap, totally affordable for her. I knew this machine would be in the hands of a 9 year old, so I told her she MUST get the extended replacement warranty from Best Buy.
After a few false starts (2 busted power supplies and 2 brand new machine replacements in the first 6 months) this box has been running like a champ for over 3 years now. The kid plays DVDs, video games, music, and all sorts of spyware-induced Web activity (read: neopets) on it and I’ve only had to do one basic big clean and one OS upgrade because he begged me to.
I installed more ram at one point and replaced the CDRW and the monitor…but i have done three times as much to my own machines in the same amount of time and I am a “good user” not a smart assed pre-teen like my cousin.
Yeah you get what you pay for, but if you pay attention to what you’re doing eMachines work just as well as any machine. People can seriously fuck up any machine you put in front of them.
Catsix: g33k grr1s un1t3!
Computers built with shoddy parts in order to keep the costs low and that skimp out on things for the same reason don’t run as well as those that have the necessary resources to run applications.
Ten years ago, it might not have been such a problem to use a computer with a processor that has no level 2 cache, but there’s no way you’re going to get Windows XP to run functionally on it, resource hog that it is. An Emachine with a cheap onboard video card that shares RAM with the rest of the system isn’t going to play World of Warcraft for anything, won’t render the textures for the ground, the sky, water, or even the characters properly.
About the only part you’re right about is that people can fuck up any computer, but an Emachine is not designed to be a regular computer, the main system that all the stuff is done on. They’re glorified WebTV, and it’s dishonest as hell that Emachines were ever marketed as if they’d be the only computer you need. They simply do not have the requisite hardware to handle everything the modern computer user wants.
/me feels a minor worry vanish
Oh, and Ishini Sanshigo: Why are you called Onetwo Threefourfive?
Does your niece use Kazaa? Download ringtones? Browse around online games? Look at porn? Happily download otherwise “free” stuff? Is she at all aware about what kind of browsing habits she needs to develop to protect her machine from scumware?
There are all kinds of things “kids” do that make them significantly more likely to have problems then more responsible parties. My parents have an ancient, 400mhz Celeron Gateway. They basically do email, scan pictures, burn some CD’s, and look for cheap airfare. Never really have a problem. When my college-age little brother comes home for the holidays, though, the machine suddenly gets mysteriously hosed. The weekend after he leaves, I go over an clean everything up until the next time he swings by.
99.9999% of the time, a PC’s hardware has absolutely nothing to do with its succeptability to scumware. It comes down to software and the user.
My company has an Emachine that was saved from the dumpster serving happily as a web server right now. Other than the time I accidentally shut down power to the whole building while fixing the timer on our generator transfer switch, it hasn’t been rebooted in at least a year.
Wow. That comes as a complete surprise to me. I’ve been using mine for two years, doing everything from burning CDs to balancing my checkbook to posting on the Dope to playing Pirates! to using Word to running a wireless network in my house and everything else I’ve ever done on any other computer, and I have had not one single problem, ever. I’ve never had any catastrophic crashes, no hardware failures, no software has ever refused to run on it.
I’ll readily admit I’m no computer expert, and that you probably have more technical knowledge in your pinky than I have in my whole head, but until now I had no idea that I actually needed another, more expensive computer to do the things that I’ve been doing for the past two years. Thanks for letting me know.
Good for you. However, I still believe that the Emachine was designed to be a cheap computer on which to check e-mail and browse the web, and that it wasn’t desgined to be used for much more than that by the users who purchased them. Of course, I have a very low opinion of the Celeron processor in general, specifically because of the things it lacks in order to make it a ‘cheap Pentium.’ I also think that most onboard video (at least, all the ones I’ve ever seen) are on the really low end of the scale and tend not to hold up to the kind of use that I put a computer to. Sharing RAM for video is one of those things that irritates me to no end, and is something that I’ve seen to be a problem in a lot of computers.
The T3624 they’ve got for a desktop right now has a Celeron processor, which is low in the L2 cache (512 KB would be a hell of a lot better than the 256 KB it has) and is sharing 64 MB of its total 256 (the bare minimum for XP to run in anything approaching a ‘good’ manner) for the onboard video. Even my hundred dollar video card has 256 MB of memory on it and its own dedicated processor for video, which means applications aren’t starving for memory that’s being hogged by the video card.
A 60 GB hard drive is OK, but not that great, especially now when mass storage is continuing to get cheaper and cheaper and you’re often paying more per byte for the smaller drives than the larger drives.
Their 600$ model shares a whopping 224 MB of memory for video out of the total 512 MB that comes with the machine, it’s still got a Celeron processor and lacks expansion bays for additional drives. The hard drive, at least, is 160 GB, but that’s about the only thing I can see that’s really worth much in this system, and even those can be picked up cheaply if you’re building your own. It’s also the only one I see that comes with an actual Pentium processor. Shock and awe.
It’s underpowered for the kind of use they claim it’ll be good for - the hottest games with the 3D graphics. It’ll run Pirates!, but I doubt it would handle World of Warcraft, which recommends a GeForce 2 or better video card and which I’ve seen run like shit on video cards with less than 256 MB of dedicated RAM. They’re substandard, and a much better system could be built for a very minor difference in price.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head - my eMachine gacks every time I try to run a memory-intensive app.
I’ve upgraded my RAM once, and I’m out. There’s no room left for any more upgrades. And I did buy it for (in part) the advertised upgradeability. It has been just fine for email, surfing, word processing, and spreadsheet apps, though, so I’m not complaining too loudly - just won’t buy another.
Dang it, I meant to say graphics intensive apps.