[ale] Need a chep machine

[Greg Clifton]

I was going to reply with much the same info as Geoffrey just posted. Acer
is the biggest selling brand of notebooks in Europe (or was about 2 yrs.
ago). I do expect that they have raised the quality of their product from
what Emachines formerly offered. I've only ever worked on one and it was a
hard drive problem, but like the old Compaq's it had some of the BIOS info
written to the hard drive, so you couldn't just replace the hard drive and
go on our merry way. Wound up replacing it with a Dell fro ~ $400 or $500
(this was maybe 6 yrs. ago).

That said, over all, computer hardware is far more reliable now than it was
10 yrs. ago. There are only a few hard drive manufacturers for all
manufacturers to choose from (Hitachi, Toshiba, Samsung, Seagate & WD) and
memory is pretty darn good these days, both the chips and the modules. The
things that separate the higher quality from the lower quality  machines are
basically the components on the motherboard and the power supply. Is a $200
Emachines as good as a $800 "roll your own", no, but it is still a LOT of
computer for the money and compute-power wise, probably something most of us
would have been proud to have owned not many years ago.  OK, so maybe you
have to replace the power supply or even the whole unit in 2-3 years, is
that better than dropping $300-$500+ today? To each his own, in that
decision.

GC

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Geoffrey <lists at serioustechnology.com>wrote:

> Warren Myers wrote:
> > every eMachines box I've used has worked on the order of 2-4 years.
>
> Emachines was purchased by gateway and now acer now owns them.  I've
> heard their quality has gone up since the acquisitions, but no personal
> experience.
>
> >
> > WMM
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 8:57 AM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> Emachines are bottom-feeders. Lifespan measured in months not years.
> >> Disposable hardware by design. If that's OK for the use, $200 is a very
> >> cheap price for new hardware.
> >>
> >> On Mar 29, 2010 8:30 AM, "Chuck Payne" <terrorpup at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Guys,
> >>
> >> Don't take this as spam, but I just got an e-mail from buy.com, they
> >> have e-machine for $200, are they good machine?
> >>
> >> http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=214870148&i=0&adid=17070
> >>
> >> --
> >> -----------------------------------------
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> >>
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>
>
> --
> Until later, Geoffrey
>
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> the government from wasting the labors of the people under
> the pretense of taking care of them."
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