"NO-NAME" Company actually took care of me!!! Cool!
Written: Aug 25 '04
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
| Quality of Tech Support: |
 |
|
|
Pros: Low price, nice looking case, 4 USB ports, easily upgradable
Cons: Fans are a little noisy
The Bottom Line: Not "state of the art", but well worth the money. Great for a 2nd or kid's PC. A better value if you are computer "savvy".
|
|
|
| dragracer's Full Review: Microtel (sysmar745) PC Desktop |
Got this machine a couple of months ago from walmart.com on a recommendation from my boss. It was less than $200 so I figured why not give it a try....not much to lose if it's junk. I threw a floppy drive, my old cd burner, and some more memory in it. The one I got came loaded with the Lindows OS so I played with that for day or two and then formatted it and loaded Windows 2000. The machine was MUCH faster than the old P300 I had been using for the last 4 or 5 years. So for the money invested, I was pretty happy with it. I figured for $200 it was pretty much "disposable"...LOL.
I started having trouble with it a few weeks ago so I finally just decided to reformat the drive and reload it from scratch. Well it just would not load. It would get to a different point each time and then an error would pop up. I tried everything short of replacing the motherboard but it did the same thing. I had just about decided just to write it off as a bad experiment and throw it in the trash. I found Microtel's website and sent them a quick email explaining the problem. Never really expected to hear back from them but to my surprise, when I got home that evening I had a message from them on the answering machine. About 30 minutes later they called back so I told them what I had done. The guy was very nice and told me he was just going to send me a new motherboard since I had done everything possible to isolate the problem. Got the new MB a few days later, popped it in and all was well again. There was some sort of mixup when I returned the bad MB and it was not accepted so I called them to find out why. The lady I talked to was VERY nice and apologetic but had no idea why the package would have been rejected. Anyway, she arranged for UPS to come to my house and pick up the package so I would not have to pay to ship it back(again).
So this is not a "great" machine, but it is entirely adequate for most day to day use like surfing the web, using a word processor, playing most games, etc. It comes with onboard sound and video that are more than adequate for just about anything. An AGP video slot is available plus a couple of PCI slots. Comes with four (rear) USP ports also.
This was mostly a cheap experiment on my part but I would recommend this, or any Microtel model, to just about anyone. I think systems like this are directed more toward people that know computers and are able to upgrade/add components and software themselves. If you had to take it to someone to do all this for you then the cost might be prohibitive.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 199
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: over 1000
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: CD-ROM
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
dragracer
|
|
Reviews written: 10
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2008 Shopping.com, Inc.