When my cousin went off to college he was looking for a new computer to do his work on and maybe play a few games on but he didnt want to spend more than a thousand. We looked all over and the Essential 500c seemed our best bet.

Its great for word proccesing and playing games (and for a great price tag), but it doesnt really offer that much in the way of speed/memory. If you get it "bogged" down with a lot of mp3s or files it works really slow (and your probably saying, "well and computer will fill up its memory eventually" but this happens so quick.) As soon as you "work it in" and get you mp3s on and some games, it already started running slower (not overnight but after like a month). Maybe he just didnt take care of it very well and he loaded a lot of stuff on. If you want a real performance PC, check out the Gateway Performance 933!

This definitely serves the purposes of school work and light "recreational use" but does not offer up the speed/memory of more "performance" based comps. He took a lot of memory up really quick, but this computer would probably be an excellant choice for a first family computer or a school comp.







Recommended: Yes