Well, in my case an eMachines M6805 laptop has served me extremely well for the past 3 years. Granted, I electivly upgraded the HDD, RAM, sound card, and OS, but it has soldiered through a lot. It can play Oblivion and Half-life 2 just fine, and I can still lug it around. Since I didn’t ever need techsupport can’t rate those, but the hardware as held up great.
I agree though firefox is a must.
Hmm, well maybe eMachines have improved recently. 4 years ago, a lot of their models were OK on paper to run, say, The Sims, but they had a lot of weird driver problems.
I bought my first eMachines 3 years ago, and it has served me pretty well. I did have to replace my power supply 13 months ago, but that was because I did something dumb. My new machine is also eMachines, because I’ve been quite satisfied with the old one, and it’s a nearly optimal price/quality combination for me. Since I have no time to play the total-immersion, hours on end, kinds of games that come out now, this brand’s capability for game-playing is irrelevant to me. So, like control-z, I find it a good choice for newbies with no (real or potential) gaming interests, and also perfectly adequate for office work. At the time I bought it, PC Mag was rating it as their choice for a cheap machine.
I paid a little over $400 for my eMachines PC. I added an old PCI video card and old monitor, and haven’t had any problems. My main monitor runs off the integrated video card. There’s a PCI-express slot available, so I’ll report back when I upgrade the videocard.
The HD is PATA, but there are 4 available SATA slots. So, theoretically, I could have 6 hard drives and 2 CD/DVD drives. That’s more than any Dell PC that I’ve seen has capacity for. I’ve got 1GB of RAM in 2 of the 4 slots, so I could upgrade that as well. The only problems have been the OP, and the fact that disabling the onboard NIC will cause the PC to just turn off about 40% of the time.
Diablo II is the most hardware demanding game that I play on it, so I have no idea how WOW would do.
All in all, I’ve been happy with the price vs. performance.