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Our emachines T1400: cheap AND good?

Back when I only had one computer at a time, the mantra was "buy most computer you can afford." That's no longer true. I'm not sure when it changed, but at least two things have changed the equation for us: first, we already have five computers in the house, and we don't plan on getting rid of any of them, and second, cheap machines are finally "good enough."

If you've got only one computer, you need to leave yourself some breathing room. You need room to add more hard drives, and perhaps a second CD-RW or DVD. You might want to add that Firewire port or perhaps a second display card so you can have a two-headed system. You need empty SIMM slots so you can bulk up when the next release of Windows comes out.

But when you've got lots of machines in the house, you don't need to pack everything you need into a single box. We already have a box with a CD-RW. We have an iMac that's with a DVD drive and a Firewire port. When we go to buy another computer, we can buy one that just meets the need at hand.

Up until very recently, cheap computers were not good enough. This review from the summer of 2001 describes an eMachines box with a PIII 550, 64MB RAM, and a 15gig hard drive for $650. That's not bad, but you'd almost certainly want to upgrade the memory; if you want to run Windows XP, you'd want at least 128MB, 256 if you could get it. You'd probably want a bigger hard drive.

But somewhere in the last year, the lowest-end machines have passed a threshold. The machine we just bought, an eMachines T1400, is proof of that fact.

Best Buy advertises eMachines boxes almost every week. eMachines and Best Buy have been running extensive rebates, which brings the price of the lowest-end machine down to $399. Best Buy almost always has 12 months "same as cash" promotion for computers as well. Both of those things lured me down to the local store last month. The $399 box was a Celeron with 128mb of memory and a 20gig disk. Right next to it was an Athlon with twice the memory and disk for $200 more. I went for the Athlon.

The specs:

Athlon 1600+ processor (1.4ghz clock), 256Mb SDRAM, 40 gig Maxtor 4D040H2 (5400 RPM), integrated S3 Graphics ProSavage AGP adapter (8MB on card; uses 32MB of system memory), 16/10/40 CD-RW (GCE-8160B), 56kb integrated modem, AC 97 Audio Integrated sound card, 3 USB, 1 parallel/1 serial port, 1 MIDI/game port, 17" monitor, wheel mouse, Windows XP Home, Works 2000, and Money 2002. The package also came with a Lexmark ink Z43 jet printer. I added a $20 PCI Ethernet card to complete the package.

Total price: $1,075, with 7% tax. Total rebates: $350, which brought my final price down to $725.

Pros

Price. Front panel port access (1 USB, 1 game port, microphone and headphone jacks). Keyboard and mouse quality are reasonable for a cheap machine. This box hibernates and resumes very quickly by pushing the power button -10 seconds to hibernate, 20 to resume. (That's almost certainly due to XP, but it's nice nonetheless.)

Cons

Slower hard drive (5400rpm). It has a noisy fan (but not as bad as the hard disk whine on the iMac.). The noise is of the white noise/moving air variety. Tech support is reputed to be poor. That's not much of an issue unless something breaks.

Cnet claims that the extra boost from using an Athlon is probably squandered by the poor performance of the built-in graphics card. That's probably true.

Expandability is limited. The T1400 has two SIMM slots, and both are in use. There's really no place to add additional internal drives. It does have three PCI slots, though the Ethernet card takes one of them. Presumably another one could be used to add a USB2 card, which would give a high-speed expansion option. There's no additional AGP slot.

The Lexmark Z43 printer started streaking within a week; I returned it and bought a Canon S520.

Conclusion

It's good enough. There are things I like, things I don't like, but for what my wife needed, and for the price, I'm happy.

The main rap against the box is that the expandability is limited and hardware choices have compromised performance.  Both are true, but both aren't relevant for my needs. 

Postscript: thoughts from 10 months in

Jan 3, 2003: The longer we have this system, the less I'm satisfied with it. Mind you, this is my opinion; I don't use it every day: my spouse does. But it strikes me that when I sit down to use it, I see odd delays and slowdowns that aren't consistant with a machine that should be performing at Pentium 4 speeds. It could be the disk, it could be the OS, but I don't see those same problems with the 1.6 P4 Dell laptop I've been using with XP Professional, or for that matter with the P3/500 Win2k system I normally use at home. A desktop system should do a little better. So, would I buy it again? Hard question: I might look a little closer now at one of the white box systems from one of the local stores.

Last update: 4/8/2003; 9:01:51 PM.