buying pc online

[Apokalipse]

apple? lmao. Apple are horribly built for word processing and Internet surfing. It's only good for Multimedia.

why do you say that?
yes, apples are very good at multimedia, but how does that mean they are not very good for word and internet surfing?
both word and internet surfing require far less resources than 99% of what you would do in multimedia
well, actually you could put word under multimedia also, but it is still at the lower end

anyway, I would just suggest to get whatever is cheapest, they will all do the job fine

 

[desiboi]

What type of apples are you talking about? iMac's? If yes, then don't buy it, the others are fine. Our school has iMacs and eMacs, they are so slow, we got them brand new six months ago. They already make that crackling hard drive noise which can be heard from the other side of the room!

EDIT: Ok now I saw what apple you are talking about. It's pretty good, but I don't see any good ventilation on the case. And it look like as if it is made out of plastic. Plastic? That is the worst thing to make computer cases.

 

[smileygladhands]

MAC's used to have an edge over pc's as far as multimedia/video editing. But now, if you buy the right parts, you can have a pc that will work far better than any mac, for those aspects.

The emachines was actually decent. Great for what she needs it and an extra AGP slot to put a decent low-level card in.

 

[beedubaya]

I would definately stay away from emachines all together. Believe me....after working at Office Depot and seeing most of them come back (hardware failures) after a few months of use...I know they are crap. I would advise staying away from manufacturers all together.

A commonly overlooked brand is SystemMax, which isn't a bad deal considering that they let you custom choose your specs and their technical support is here in the US.

 

[smileygladhands]

I would definately stay away from emachines all together. Believe me....after working at Office Depot and seeing most of them come back (hardware failures) after a few months of use...I know they are crap. I would advise staying away from manufacturers all together.

A commonly overlooked brand is SystemMax, which isn't a bad deal considering that they let you custom choose your specs and their technical support is here in the US.

Well, maybe they changed since being purchased by Gateway, but the system I bought from them was before the "merger". It's almost 4 years old with all of the same hardware and no problems. In fact, the only problem I had was with the vga fan on the BFG Geforce Asylum AGP card.

I've made my own AMD 64 system since then and given the emachines to my girlfriend to use. She hasn't had any issues with it.

 

[Trotter]

OK, don't rag on eMachines. My sig, replacing the 512 RAM with 128, removing the video card and the DVD, and you have an eMachine w2040. I've been using it for two years without a problem.

 

[smileygladhands]

apple? lmao. Apple are horribly built for word processing and Internet surfing. It's only good for Multimedia.

Um, not really. Are you forgetting that every school in the US used to have MAC's and they were the first to build a decent word processing program?

As far as now, Mac's and PC's can use much of the same software.. including Office. The only real difference is the hardware which is difficult and expensive to upgrade.

 

[dk]

I'll stand up for eMachines as well, I bought a refurbished one from tigerdirect for about $500, put a cheap Nvidia 5200 card and another 512MB of RAM in it and played it hard for six months before building my new computer. It worked flawlessly the whole time and is still a great home office/media computer.

 

[contry]

yeah i got an emachines too, its the t5026 model, it was 600dlls after rebates and i love this pc, its a p4 3.06,512 ddr3200,160gig SATA, yeah it has onboard video but iam saving to get a 6600gt, it has a pci-e slot, and iam thinking of getting twin 256 memory modules to keep the dual channel memory going, after the upgrades my pc its gonna be worth about 900dlls and its gonna be faster than it is ,btw iam a high school student on a budget.
so just dont get fooled by all the things they say about emachines, most of the people that criticize them never had an emachines and they just do it because they dont want to accept that emachines has the best price : performance ratio.
if u never had one please just shut up and dont criticize

 

[smileygladhands]

yeah i got an emachines too, its the t5026 model, it was 600dlls after rebates and i love this pc, its a p4 3.06,512 ddr3200,160gig SATA, yeah it has onboard video but iam saving to get a 6600gt, it has a pci-e slot, and iam thinking of getting twin 256 memory modules to keep the dual channel memory going, after the upgrades my pc its gonna be worth about 900dlls and its gonna be faster than it is ,btw iam a high school student on a budget.
so just dont get fooled by all the things they say about emachines, most of the people that criticize them never had an emachines and they just do it because they dont want to accept that emachines has the best price : performance ratio.
if u never had one please just shut up and dont criticize

It's really true. In 2001, I shopped around A LOT before deciding on an emachine. If you're going to get a mainstream, prebuilt, emachines is the way to go. The guy at Best Buy attempted to talk me out of it saying, well.. you get what you pay for and compared it to buying a cheap car. What a dolt.. I explained to him that despite what the brand name may be, what matters most is what's on the inside.
While everyone at the time was offering Celeron's and MB's without any upgradeability. Emachines was the only one, in that price range, offering a normal P4 and a fully-upgradeable MB.

Now, I always build my pc's and wouldn't have it any other way. But for the less experienced user, It's not a bad name to go with.