the eMonster ravaged me, but not my wallet
Written: Jun 03 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: inexpensive, great all around machine
Cons: only 1 serial port
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| wilco42's Full Review: eMachines eMonster |
with the number of inexpensive premade machines growing on the market, it's hard to decide who to buy a computer from, if you don't make one yourself. i am currently using an 400MHz celeron eMachines box at the office, and recently was able to use an eMonster. the 400Mhz eMachines box has its own set of problems, but that's for another review. when my friend got his eMonster 500, i was preparing myself to laugh at him silly. instead, what i found was a surprisingly decent machine, and for the price, an exceptional machine.
specifics:
my friend's eMonster is called the "eMonster 500". his particular configuration uses the intel p3/500MHz cpu. a speedy cpu with a base memory of 64MB. for the normal user, 64MB would be more than sufficient to power microsoft office, but because my friend and i consider ourselves power users, we popped the ram out and added 256MB to his system. the machine ran well with 64MB, and it just flew with 256MB. switching between windows, multitasking, and playing songs at the same time was effortless with this machine.
components:
the next test for this machine was, of course, games. his machine is powered by a 16MB 3dfx voodoo3 agp card. basically there are only two choices when getting a gaming video card. either you use an nVida chip or a 3dfx chip. his system came with the latter, which was fine by us. games ran beautifully, the two of us were quite surprised at the game performance for the price of the machine.
the machine also comes with a somewhat generic sound card, but we had no complaints about it.
the 8x DVD-ROM played our DVDs fine, though it uses software decoding, so i would suspect that any sort of multitasking is not a good idea when watching dvds.
eMachines come with keyboards that have a pleasant feel to them, and the mouse is less than desirable, but quite functional.
the hard drive was a little on the small side for us (13GB in my friend's machine) but for the typical user, it should be more than sufficient.
one of the really stand out features of the eMonster (as is also typical of most eMachines machines) is that they have two USB ports, but one USB port is located in the front of the machine, so that you don't have to reach all the way around the back to plug your USB devices in. a very handy feature, since we had a USB video camera to test out on his computer.
one drawback though was that there was only one serial port on this machine. since my friend has a palm pilot cradle which uses a serial cable and a digital camera that uses a serial cable, he has to switch cables around in the back whenever he wants to download pictures from his camera.
the back of the case is well labelled with pictures and is color coded as well, leaving no question as to what cable belongs where. hooking the machine up and powering it up was effortless and simple.
conclusions:
overall, i was deeply impressed with the eMonster. it was a solid performer and for the price, you just can't beat it. i'd recommend it to anybody who doesn't want to build their own computer. one small thing that i would add, however is ram. you can never have too much ram, and this particular machine can address up to 256MB of ram. it only has 2 dimms though, and one is already occupied with 64MB from the factory. the motherboard itself is very compact, so be careful not to dislodge any cables if you do plan to add more ram or other accessories to your computer. the single serial port, which is really annoying if you happen to have several serial devices, forces a rating of 4 stars, but really, it's closer to 4.5 stars.
Recommended:
Yes
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 401-500
RAM: 64
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
wilco42
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 - Top 1000 |
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Member: Mike Tanaka
Location: san jose, ca
Reviews written: 44
Trusted by: 12 members
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