Emachine -- the only computer with a pupal phase.
Feb 01 '02
The Bottom Line eMachine desktops are cheap, but you get what you pay for. The money you save will be wiped out by buying replacement parts.
I should begin this article by saying that I don't own an eMachine myself. A friend of mine owns one, and I have helped her out with it numerous times. Each time, it gets to be a little less eMachine.
Yes, just like a caterpillar makes itself a cocoon and metamorphoses into a butterfly, this eMachine has slowly but surely lost its eMachine-ness. She bought this computer a few years ago (it's a 333 mHz Celeron) as an eMachine. And slowly, but surely, it has shed eMachines parts, which are in turn replaced by parts that actually have a lifespan not measured in months.
I have read in a few other epinions on eMachines that eMachines uses refurbished parts. If this is true, then eMachines needs a new refurbisher. Badly. The parts we have replaced on this computer failed in months.
To begin with, the floppy drive failed soon after she bought it. At the time, we were not acquainted yet, and so she simply lived without a floppy drive. Then her CD-ROM drive failed, approximately a year after she bought the computer. This is not totally surprising -- CD-ROMs will fail eventually, since they have moving parts -- but one year? I know of plenty of CD-ROM drives that are four years old and are still in service. THe modem met a nasty end in a storm. (That one I'm willing to write off as not being eMachines's fault, since she said it died in a storm and they can't be held responsible for that. But I wonder.) Fortunately, by that time she was on a cable modem and did not need the modem.
Next, a few months later, the power supply died. eMachines is not alone in making cases with their own power supply; the idea being that instead of going to CompUSA and picking out a standard power supply for $30, you must buy their power supply for $90. They also said it would take seven days. My friend's then fiancee announced that that was not acceptable, and took the dead machine to a local computer store, where he was able to get a case that fit it properly.
So I did the transplant surgery and put the motherboard and all its toys in the new case. One might think the problem would be solved, but no. After perhaps another year of good service, she was able to cadge a new hard drive. I was busy at the time, so she asked another programmer friend to install the hard drive.
The existing hard drive that she had was a Seagate. Seagate and eMachines are soul mates in the computer world: they make 'em cheap. Seagates usually live for about two years before going to meet their maker. This one, to its credit, had lasted about three years all told.
Now I'm not sure if the death of the Seagate is the fault of eMachines or the programmer who installed it. When a hysterical phone call prompted me out there, I discovered the hard drives were physically installed. However, the computer would not boot, and the BIOS did not recognize that they were there.
So the hard drive was dead. And it died hard. I managed to get it to Scandisk, but it found approximately 300 errors and then choked off dead. We'll even write this off as possibly damaged by the programmer who installed it (it did last for three years, and I found broken off chunks of CD case wedged between the drives.)
I put in the new drive and installed Windows 98. All her data on the old drive was gone, but it worked. Now all that remains of the original eMachine is the motherboard and processor. It has probably completed its pupal phase, metamorphosing from an eMachine to a home-built PC.
As such, I cannot recommend eMachines. Even if we discount the failure of the hard drive and the modem, we have a CD-ROM, a floppy drive, and a power supply fail, all within two years. That's simply unacceptable quality control. The money she saved on the original purchase of the eMachine was more than wiped out with having to purchase replacement parts for the ones that failed.
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Epinions.com ID:
kurt_g
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Location: Brick, NJ
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