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But what good are they if they're not useful? Every e-machine I've seen in operation takes an hour to boot regardless of the specs. That's probably where all the "high error rate but still sellable" stuff gets compiled into systems, at a markup.

damn. I mean only VGA ports.

Is HDMI okay?

If so, then how about Staples? See the specs at the eMachines website since Staples doesn't make the port info clear.

Maybe you want both DVI and HDMI in place of your beloved S-Video? No problem. Walmart has the Dell Studio Hybrid. They stock it right in the store in some locations. It can also be shipped from the website to your address or shipped for free to any store when purchased on the website with their site-to-store option.

Best Buy is not a bad place to purchase. They claim they'll match any store price for the same item.

They aren't supposed to give you the rebate afterwards, but they did last time when I picked up an eMachine T6420 for $450 after rebate when Walmart was selling the same machine for $500.

Since the IBM PC first came out, the acronym PC has become equivalent to a x86 box instead of just any personal computer. It doesn't matter what OS I'm running on an x86 box; DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, OS X, Plan 9; it is still just a PC. Macs have always been personal computers, and Apple has always referred to them as such (but never with the acronym PC), but they never architecturally became plain PCs until the new Intel Macs came out. Now the Macs are just plain, boring x86 PCs now, but of course Apple will never come out and say, "We now make PCs like everybody else now." Instead, they still want people to feel that there is still something special about the insides of the Mac (and for the umpteenth time, the operating system doesn't count), that demands paying the Apple premium.

I still maintain that Apple has made a mistake with its switch to Intel. It is only a matter of time before customers realize that a Mac is now just another PC (the only difference is the operating system), and it is only a matter of time before somebody with a lot of time on his/her hands gets OS X running on their $299 Dell Celeron machine. As soon as people add two and two together and figure that it is cheaper to buy a 64-bit Sempron box at $399 ($349 with rebate + $129 for OS X = $478) compared to a $499 Mac Mini that will most likely have a 32-bit Core Solo processor with a case that isn't as expandable, and with somewhat underpowered stats (the current Mac Mini only has a 40GB hard drive, whereas the eMachines box has a 100GB hard drive), Apple will have a harder time justifying its prices and specifications, unless Apple diversifies its offerings and sells its offerings at competitive prices.

Don't get me wrong, I still like Apple and the Mac, but I still mourn the loss of the PowerPC, especially the G5. I am personally not a fan of the x86, and I wish that crufty architecture will just die and lead to new innovations in other architectures, such as the Cell processor. Sure, the new Intel chips are nice and run cooler, but I was waiting for something that was truly compelling, like a Cell computer or in 2008 or so a PowerBook G5. Oh well, c'est la vie. Guess I'll save up for a dual dual-core Power Mac G5 while they still exist....

1. Ad-Aware SE
2. Spybot Search & Destroy
3. SpywareBlaster
4. Microsoft Anti-Spyware
5. Some Anti-Virus Program that you like (at my work, we install Norton even though it is a resource hog, but never Norton Internet Security since it eventually always fucks a computer up)

Set your Anti-virus program to scan at least weekly, and automatically update itself, Update and sca with Ad-Aware and Spybot weekly at a minimum, and update and protect with SpywareBlaster weekly at a minimum.

It is absolutely ridiculous that a person should have to do this to keep their computer running decently. We get so many Windows machines in the shop that it isn't even funny, but thusfar, whenever we have managed to convince someone to upgrade to a MacOS X machine (Typically when their Dell, Compaq, HP, E-Machines has a motherboard failure). They have came back completely excited and astonished that they don't really have to worry about spyware and viruses so much.

My reccomendation on keeping your WIndows XP machine in top performance. Go buy a high-end Mac and run VirtualPC if it can run whatever program you NEED to run (Note: Games do not count), if you cannot run your Prorgram under VPC, buy a low-end PC and keep it off the network.

I know I've seen them in stores, but try Gateway and eMachines to see for yourself.

A new eMachine PC is $599, and you get an AMD 3200+ processor, 512 MB RAM, 160 GB HD, DVD +/- RW drive. Granted you get a GeForce4 MX integrated GPU, but comparing this to a 1.25 G4 I'd say you get double the perfomance for less money.

You can find it at http://www.emachines.com/products/products.html?pr od=eMachines_T3256/

We need hardware protection too. We've got a number of old machines that were originally running NT 4, which are now running (slowly) windows 2000.

From a corporate perspective, this is just stupid, and dead wrong. Expenses on computer hardware are amortized over 3 years to the IRS, as a standard accounting practice. Thus, after 3 years, there's no compelling reason (and certainly no tax advantage) for keeping the old thing around.

This fits quite nicely with Microsoft's 5-ish year support time for an O/S. Upgrade your computer, already. It generally costs more to have an employee at the desk for one week than the computer at the desk is worth.

Also, notice that the newer computers will be faster, so maintenance costs are lower since your admin will be spending less time waiting for patches to install, and will also have improved patch management tools to manage their installation.

So, my guess is that you are either (1) running a very small business and cash is extremely (as in, barely "profitable") tight, or (2) clueless.

If your computers are really important, and their performance significantly impacts production, and you DON'T upgrade to at least a reasonably modern level, you're being stupid. Buy the equipment you need to run your business competently and efficiently, or at least admit to yourself that your business is really a hobby.

Another good option is http://www.emachines.com/. I plan to buy one for myself soon.

Would you settle for an emachine:

http://www.emachines.com/products/products.html?pr od=eMachines_M6811

Emachines has it listed as 2.0 GHz, but several people on forums called Emachines and AMD and confirmed this is the 2.2 GHz 3400+.

Supposedly as well Best Buy already has them, and J&R Electronics as well with a $100 rebate.

The specs the $799 Mac are roughly the same as a $399 PC here (the Mac has Firewire, probably a more robust processor, and faster memory, while the PC has built-in ethernet, a *much* higher clock speed, and a memory reader). When most people consider their computer an appliance (versus a performance machine), saving $400 for a 'mundane' PC is a big deal.

Also, the person who spends $2,000+ on a PC is either a geek who's putting together an amazingly fast machine themself, or an average person who has the money to buy a top of the line pre-built PC. Neither fall into the category of someone looking for a budget computer.

Some general comments after reading the posts, and checking the links...

It looks like the actual WideScreen offering from Sony is the S-series
(Link: http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/VGN-S70B/), not the E-series as mentioned in the post. Looks cool, but I think the WideScreen to buy if you are going to go ye old Windows or Linux route would be a 64-bit offering, like the current 64-bit AMD laptop from eMachines.

Glad to see that Sony lowered the resolution on the U-series. The older U1/U3/U101 model had XGA resolution on a 6.4 screen. I saw a U3 at trade show...beautiful screen, but talk about turning you cross-eyed. It was almost necessary to use the magnifier tool on every screen. 800x600 just makes more sense on a screen this small.

Any finally, that new VAIO Pocket player looks more like RCA Lyra Audio/Video jukebox then it does the iPod. I believe the Lyra lasted less than a year for RCA (they don't sell it from their web site anymore). I'd say Sony's will most likely follow that same fate. Most consumers I know want more storage in a smaller size, not larger.

My Japanese is not that good, but my vision is... for now

For casual use, the best CD-R duplicator out there is most likely to throw a cheap no-name CD-ROM drive into your computer next to your favorite burner. If you have a DVR-ROM drive next to your CD burner, you're also all set. It's just about as good as it gets for 1-to-1 copying.

There are some standalone devices that live to do nothing more than copy... but with prices Checking in at close to $400 you might as well buy a Sub-$500 PC that has both a reader and a burner right out of the box if you're too lazy to build one from the parts yourself. Afterall, for the extra $100 you get a functional PC instead of the one-trick pony of a device that consists of nothing more than a reader and writer with firmware in between.

If you're publishing content on CDs, then you might be able to justify the cost of getting a one-to-many CD copier device... but think carefully about how often you're actually going to use it before taking the dive. It may be cheaper and easier to just outsource the project to a fulfillment house that does that kind of thing for a living. However, for this particular question's situation of making a one-to-one digital copy every few years to restart the aging clock, having one-to-many capability just isn't going to help much.

I sort of laugh at Appledot these days. I mean a $1,299 eMachines Athlon 64 laptop with widescreen and Radeon 9600 video is ignored, but a laptop three times the cost that is not as feature rich or powerful not only has to be mentioned in rumor, and then again when it is announced. How about mentioning the new 4 way Opteron HP server just announced, or eMachines fine laptops? I'm XP, XP 64, Mandrake 64, and FreeBSD 64, and I can cluster three of them for the price of one of the Apples!! Heck, even Compaq has an Athlon 64 notebook for $1,299 in Best Buy now, but people are drooling over a small speed bump from Apple? I don't get it. Anyway, I think I'll buy a 7200 RPM Apricorn drive, swap out my 3000+ for an Athlon 64 3400+, and upgrade to a GB of memory and load levels faster in UT2004, Farcry, and Battlefield Vietnam. After those upgrades the cost will be closer to the Powerbook in cost except that I get to Ebay the parts I replace, and I get to enjoy 2.2GHz of 64 bit power! You see you can upgrade the Athlon 64 laptops yourself. Can you do that with a Mac, or a Dell for that matter? Nope.

This, along with the over expensive G5 that gets THRASHED by $600 emachines, the $129 a year extortion fees, the crappy ibook logic boards, the crappy ipod batteries, the Firewire hard drive destroying bug and more, how can you be a zealot representing this crap company! If microsoft made Mac OS X and Apple made Windows XP you'd be screaming bloody murder but you would be zealoting Windows XP!

So, what are you going to say for yourselves? Don't just mod me down for telling the TRUTH! Meanwhile, I am typing this from my Mandrake 10 machine. Cheap, easy, open, the Linux way of life!

Your comparison just reminds me of this. Just save yourself the trouble and get the real thing.

Most Circuit City stores have these in stock. You can look online for availability at a local store, then order it and pick it up yourself, no extraneous delivery hassles involved.

Notes on the machine (I'm typing on it right now):

The 802.11g internal wireless unit is 802.11b compatible, but you're mad if you don't upgrade your home to an 802.11g WAP router (or better, one of these) first thing after saving on the computer.

The PCMCIA slot is single-height (type-I/II), so any double-height (type-III) cards you have won't fit any more.

There are 4 USB 2.0 ports and 1 firewire port but *no* DB-9 or DB-25 connectors. You can buy a USB/RS-232 adapter for about $30 almost anywhere, but with the internal modem you probably won't need them.

I haven't done any gaming on the Radeon 9600 yet. No time for that right now.

The keyboard is a little goofy, but you were going to take a US keyboard and 60-Hz power supply and NTSC video back to Blighty, so you might not mind the hassle of the keyboard so much. They won't tell me how to remap it, either, so YMMV.

The 64-bit "3000+" Athlon CPU is overrated, but what else is new from Jerry's Kids. It's really running at about 2 GHz and is not any faster or slower than my Pentium 2.2-GHz desktop. Must be why these things are so damn cheap. Some day Microsoft will present us with non-beta versions of 64-bit Windows and we'll see if there's any real end-user value in the extra width.

GO to Best Buy, get one of these. I'm sure you can find an AC adapter for UK.

I'd get a 6807 if you could get one (DVD burner instead of the CD-RW\DVD), but they don't seem to be available yet.

'Nuff said

Well, you can buy 64-bit laptops today. They're just not x86 or Mac/PPC based.

No?

It's ugly and I wouldn't buy one, but yes, there are 64 bit x86 laptops out there, on the market, right now. And they're not expensive at all.

And no, I know what you are thinking, it barely gets warm.

I can attest to that. I recently bought one of these. Blazingly fast and MUCH cooler than my last athlon based viao laptop. In fact, the processor fan is only on about half the time.

From Rob's Ferrari gush: Part of me wishes this notebook was fueled by the Athlon64 rather than the Athlon XP-M chip.

Heh.

Heh heh.

Heh heh ha ha hee hee ho!

My brand-new Yugo can punk his Ferrari.

Maybe.

I just bought the M6807 about a month back, and I was very impressed with the raw speed and quality of the display for the price.

They've completely fixed up their support, too. I called once about a minor issue (turned out to be a weird power management setting) and the hold time was about 5 seconds--I was extremely impressed. I heard they just got bought by Gateway, though, so who knows how long the good times will last :(

Emachines? Respectible? Good lord! You must be kidding. Put down the crack pipe!

Besides for that much, I'd go for something with better ruggedness, like a thinkpad, or a powerbook.

I'm looking at one of these:

http://www.emachines.com/products/products.html?pr od=eMachines_M6807

64-bit and plenty fast though the reviews complain of weight and battery life but I guess that is to be expected.

Here, dumbfuck, peel the numbers off your sorry face.

Or the Pinto. If you drop it on the wrong side, it may explode.

Actually, that brand of computer already exists, although you don't necessarily have to drop it to get that "special" functionality.

Cheers,
IT

I just bought an eMachines m6807 notebook with an Athlon64 3000+ cpu (512MB/60GB/802.11g/DVDRW/Radeon9600/etc/etc/etc) and...yeah...probably a 32-bit version of XP Home. Pro woulda been nice but it wasn't an option; as a compensation, all the "free" bundled software uninstalled almost cleanly, and I was able to get a nifty new 802.11g WAP/switch/router/VPN with the savings vs. a comparably equipped Dell...

When I feel more confident (and get a couple of blank DVDs to use for backups) I may snarf down winxp64...

I'm fairly certain that the eMachines W2040 I'm working on (I would link to the eMachines info page on it, but I'm not going to dig for it) had Google set as the default search engine.

Like this one. Best Buy sells them for $1299 after rebates. They're getting some mentions on the Fedora Test List. It's amazing how much hardware you can get for semi-cheap when you're not paying the Centrino marketing tax. Besides, 32-bit CPUs are so last century.

Though you'll still need a NDIS wrapper to get the Broadcom 802.11g chip to work, or beat Broadcom with cluebats until they cough up the Linux driver they've apparently already written. Darn.

I'm going to stick with my desktop for now, but if I come up with an excuse to buy a notebook that's what I'll get.

Of course, is it really a 3000+? Best Buy is claiming that it's a 3000+, and it's 2.0GHz with 1MB L2 cache. The only Mobile Athlon 64 that has those specs is the 3 2 00+.

Also, eMachines now has the 6805 (and the DVD burning 6807) on their site (although not the T6000, their desktop A64), and they say the same thing. However, they're listing a $100 mail-in rebate, making it $1400 (Best Buy is selling it for $50 more than eMachines is), and they also say that Circuit City and CompUSA carry it (CC is also $50 higher than eM says, and CU doesn't claim to have ANY eM products).

Does anyone know where you could buy the 6805 for $1500 before rebate, or is it really $1550 before rebate, and eM's site is wrong?

BTW, there may be Linux compatibility issues with the 6-in-1 media card reader, as it does read Secure Digital. I don't know if having an empty SD reader on a system can cause Linux issues, but I know a filled one (AKA a Sandisk Cruzer flash drive) kernel panics Linux.

Of course, is it really a 3000+? Best Buy is claiming that it's a 3000+, and it's 2.0GHz with 1MB L2 cache. The only Mobile Athlon 64 that has those specs is the 3 2 00+.

Also, eMachines now has the 6805 (and the DVD burning 6807) on their site (although not the T6000, their desktop A64), and they say the same thing. However, they're listing a $100 mail-in rebate, making it $1400 (Best Buy is selling it for $50 more than eMachines is), and they also say that Circuit City and CompUSA carry it (CC is also $50 higher than eM says, and CU doesn't claim to have ANY eM products).

Does anyone know where you could buy the 6805 for $1500 before rebate, or is it really $1550 before rebate, and eM's site is wrong?

BTW, there may be Linux compatibility issues with the 6-in-1 media card reader, as it does read Secure Digital. I don't know if having an empty SD reader on a system can cause Linux issues, but I know a filled one (AKA a Sandisk Cruzer flash drive) kernel panics Linux.

<a href="http://www.emachines.com/products/products.h tml?pr od=eMachines_M5312">LINK</a>

Oddly enough mine arrives tomorrow, it's the emachines M5312, nice bang for the buck although it screams out "powebook wannabe". Check it out:

• official site
• bestbuy page
• unofficial forum

Oddly enough mine arrives tomorrow, it's the emachines M5312, nice bang for the buck although it screams out "powebook wannabe". Check it out:

• official site
• bestbuy page
• unofficial forum

I ran into the same problem myself - they don't even have a press release for it on their site. I'm wondering if this is really true or not. Guess we'll have to wait until eMachines decides to make a little more noise.

I give up. Looked all over at their website and can't find the T6000 anywhere. Is it such a quiet release that eMachines doesn't want to give any details about it at all?

I know that this comparing apples to oranges, but for $600 you can get a righteous laptop off Ebay or locally from a used reseller. This laptop is a full fledged computer with vast amounts more memory, storage, and room for improvement/expansion.

Considering that most people buy a new PDA every two to three years, why not just double your money now and buy a 15.4" Widescreen TFT LCD WXGA (1280 x 800 max. resolution) laptop that comes with an Athlon XP 2200+ CPU, 40GB of storage, 512MB DDR PC2100 RAM, CRDW/DVD drive, all the ports except IEEE 1394, and one of the best mobile graphics chipsets around, the ATI RADEON IGP 320M, for $1,250? It takes Mandrake 9.1 without any problems, and only demands slight tweaking from Red Hat 8.

I would rather have that laptop for four years then burn through two PDAs over the same period of time.

Is the eMac the Apple equivalent to an eMachine? If so, $799 is way too much...

Even the $500-$600 price range is still a bit too high. I should know, I am one of the 'disadvantaged people'. The only way I ever managed to get a computer to begin with was because it was an e-machines from a year ago. For only $600 I got a celeron 600mhz with 64MB 100mhz SDRam, 17" monitor, i810 shared video, and a DVD player. Sure, it wasn't much, but it was one hell of a starter system for the price (after rebates it came out to $0, if you sign up with earthlink for 3years of 56k service)

Not everyone out there needs to start out with a $1200 system. And I don't really see anyone paying even $500 on something that can only do internet browsing when for roughly the same price they can get a cheep pc that will do most anything Joe User needs to do.

FreePC
eMachines

Doh! Nevermind.