PC mag (UK) Editors Choice Oct 04

Every so often a product comes along that raises the bar for the competition. In this case it's the eMachines M5405. This 6.6-pound beauty is sleek and powerful, a rare combination in a value notebook, and it's our Editors' Choice winner.

Emachines is a computer company that was started by a corporate Best Buy employee who when out on his own to compete with the likes of Dell and HP.

The people at Best Buy despise Dell computer and Emachines is their vehicle to compete.

While the components of all personal computers are of mediocre quality these days - do not expect anything more from an Emachine computer than you would from the big box retailer who churns them out, hoping one day to exceed the sales of Dell.

The first desktop I ever bought myself...actually the only desktop I ever bought... was an emachines. There were no perks, but it was a little workhorse and brought me through 4 years of undergrad. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it though...unless you get one of those M5405s...I guess that sounds alright.

I don't know much about them, but they have always had the stigma of crappy, cheap, underpowered, crappy computers in my mind... did I mention crappy?

That being said, I buy dell for our office, and I doubt dell is much better.

I run an Emachines 5312 laptop and a custom build desktop...had two powerbook g4's before and chose to go with a cheap pc once I decided to go back to school for architecture...I prefer working in Max and Rhino...so for $799 I got me a 60 gb 512 mb athlon wireless laptop.

I still work on Macs as well, though I feel being able to work independent of the OS is the best practice.

Years ago, in articles, Dell's seemed to give most 'bang for buck'.

I've been researching and decided I'll assemble my next. 64 bit, probably AMD. But I think I've read that some software is cranky without Intel chips?

You might search google on planning a homebuilt computer (intended use, etc).

homemade computers are:
lower cost (if you don't count your labor!)
known component quality
and you have a real copy of the OS.

Even new ready-made computers need to have full reinstall of OS & software, because they're loaded with cr@pware and aren't partitioned.

Make sure you have good data backup, too. I think external drives are best.

Do some google usenet searches. "Best", "Bad", or "Quality" about manufacturers and models.

New Egg is another good place to see how people have faired with certain hardware,

I agree with e909 though...as far as desktops go it is best to build your own if you have the gumption....you will most like end up with an better and cheaper box than a manufactured computer...IMHO.

e909

i run a dual amd opteron at work which is 64 bit and there is no problem at all ever. Actually the machine has never even crashed once on me!!!

at home im using an amd athlon machine, and all software run totally fine on it