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64 Bit Athlon Notebooks Hit the Market
Omega1045 writes "Our friends at News.com.com.com are reporting that one of the first notebooks powered by the 64 bit Athlon will be made by (drumroll, please) eMachines. Slashdot has mentioned eMachines venture into 64 bit Athlon technology before. You also might note from this past press release that eMachines claims to be the 3rd biggest PC maker in the US. Hopefully this will have the dual effect of pushing the new chip into the market, and keeping it afforable of laptop junkies like me."
> I don't have much need for a 64 bit laptop
I think I could find something to do with it. 64-bit, 802.11g, USB2 and Firewire, vertical scroller (essential!), and my favorite: a built-in 6-in-1 media reader. The price is right too. Mmmmm... I don't like AMD stuff, but this thing could quickly make me a convert.
Not everybody shopping for a 64 bit notebook would buy something cheesy like an eMachines laptop.
VoodooPC has been selling their high end m:855 for some time now. Based on the Athlon 64, it also has ATI Mobility 9600 Graphics Pro chipset.
I've had good experiences with them as far as reliability. I still have a 500is that runs fine, it's been abused in nearly every way possible and upgraded as much as it can possibly be upgraded without throwing in a powerleap kit. Many of the upgrades were listed as not possible in the service manual, but http://e4all.info/ has more information (on older ones) and the upgraders forum has a lot of people that have tried everything they can to make them still useable beyond their years. Most of the older ones can at least be upgraded to 512MB with very careful ram selection. That has kept the old 500is useable, even if it is slow. It's perfectly fine as another box to have up to surf the web and what-not. I have some even slower hardware taking care of other task as well.;-)
...it's still a gamble on future OS's.
There are many things that were cheap in a lot of their older (and still in their present) models. (A lot of them are the typical things that the big makers skimp on. Severely under rated power supplies, proprietary power supplies, POS modems that have no excuse for existing in any machine, if they come with a network card replace it with something else, ram modules that may or may not be worth keeping [though they seem to be getting away from the awful ram they were putting in a few years ago]... These are not severe issues in most of them, but the proprietary power supplies in them are a pain to work around if you are going to cram a mess of drives in them. Don't expect Emachines to give you a pin out for the power supply either.) I've not known anyone who had one of their laptops though.
The biggest disppointment with Emachines is *support*. The one thing that you may have trouble with is getting support for new OS's that comes out down the road. Emachines is somewhat unreliable about supporting their hardware beyond the OS it was shipped with. This can be very bad news in a laptop, and it can be awful news if you ever have to have your laptop worked on for warranty work.
I haven't heard the kind of horror stories I've heard about Compaq laptops in terms of getting them worked on, but based on my experiences with them
It's very hard to top Compaq for the worst possible hardware, worst possible support, worst ownership experience, worst batch of proprietary hardware...in "consumer grade" products. Emachines is well above that fold for the price range they are in. Even with the corners they cut, it's never going to be as unpleasant as that to own one. For the price range they are in, they are decent enough.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
Perhaps this would be funny if it was anyway true. G4 and P4 laptops generate far more heat than Athlon 64 laptops. And well, also Athlon 64 laptops have not just hit the market, they have been available for several months. This is only the first on available from a Tier 1 vendor, and also in Best Buy. Not to mention it was not CNet/ZDNet that broke this news. It was www.AMDZone.com.
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