Avoid Emachines!

captaincranky is lucky with crappy eMachines isn't he. Time is money, so if the power supply is trashed, or the motherboard is trashed, I replace both at the same time. I can usually do this for $250 or less

captaincranky never said this approach wasn't sensible. He just says it has been, at least thus far, unnecessary for him personally. I wish my luck would would extend itself to the lottery.

However, I will say this, since my original Emachines Bestec PSU fried itself when the computer was only 6 months old, replacing the motherboard and buying a copy of XP for forms sake, would have been the most incredibly stupidest sensible thing I could possibly have done.

I had an emachine eslate laptop that lasted 7 years. Now I have a 300 dollar emachine PC at my desk and it works like a champ. Go figure.

eMachine made nearly 480 models. There are only 27 models with the defective motherboards... but that is more than all other machines, except Packard Bell, put together.

T5246

I have the E-Machine T5246 i have had this pc for aprox a year. I am not endorsing e-machine but this has been a very stable computer for me. I was very selective when buying my computer and did not make my choice based on price but the CPU RAM MotherBoard and it had to have on pci express for a later upgrade and i also wanted onboard graphics beings i had no intentions into playing games but i wanted movies and media capabilites but the option for a later up grade. 3 reasons i bought this computer foxcon MCP61SM2MA-RS2H Mother board max ram 4 gig. CPU dual-core amd 64 x2 4200+ and good cpu this time last year AM2 socket still not bad. and the PCI express slot. PROBLEM i have been upgrading this computer as of late and have come to find that it is missing 2 ram slots so only max 2 gig ram. This is not the board that is shown at foxconn. I do have a problem with this and have contacted them to find out about it I will post there reply. Even tho that is a issue i Stand behind The T5246 gateway did a good job with it. The upgrades that i have entail 500Watt PS installed last month ran the stock one for a year with minor issues at 6mnt mark.
I have also installed a second HD 250 WD caviar se 16 . I then made this the primary with the 400 gig stock as a primary storage With Linux ubuntu OS. For the Primary 250 I have vista Ult 64bit running great. I also installed a GeForce 9600 GSO PCI-E 768 MB GDDR3. All in all the computer is running great I have a windows index score of 5.0 due to my lowest score CPU all other scores were 5.7 and up . I guess i am done with this rant just wanted to stand up for my computer it has served me well and very well priced. I do belive that there is flase advertisement with foxconn labeling this board as MCP61SM2MA-RS2H it is diffrent and should be labled so Hope i can get a free board out of them if so i will post.

Not all of the emachines are bad. Heck, recently I bought a parts one for $14.99, which still had a working board on it. It's the FIC K8M-800M. There is a BIOS update for it online. I flashed the bios and I come to notice that it has onboard SATA RAID!!!! The original emachines bios didn't have support of the controller, but after the flash, the bios now shows the option to enable/disable it. The controller is embedded into the VIA VT8237R southbridge.

That is a good find. And quick responce lol I figured this thread was old enough that it would not get red

One year is not enough time to test an eMachine...
eMachines has made 329 models... There are 29 bad ones, starting with 2002... but since 2002, they have the highest failure rate in the world. Only Packard Ball was higher.
The problem is that the motherboards are usually Intel designs built in Korea under license... between one and two years, the motherboard fails and takes the power supply with it.
If you know of any computer brand with a higher failure rate, let us know. So far, eMachines wins hands down. But if you want to keep promoting them because yours still works, that is fine. They don't all fail, but 65 percent of them do... sooner or later, so save your data frequently. There is little warning when they go bad.

Model # 's ?

Yah i was just currious if my machine is a part of the list of know failures. you can see my spec's in my profile . Ty for the responce and i will back my machine untill that happens lol only thing that would piss me off if it did is if it hurts my new PS.

No, the eMachines T5246 is not on the list of the bad 29 or the not as bad 36. Please let us know if you ever experience a serious failures. As near as I can tell, eMachines or your seller should have offered you the opportunity to buy a longer warranty. I know that Wal-Mart dis for the practically identical W5246.

Good luck. Always save your data, regardless of what you computer you use.

The trigem boards are probably the ones that fail the most, like the one in the T1840. Other models use the Intel D845GVSR board which can also be found retail from Intel. I have seen several custom builds with the same board. Yet some of the Intel boards fail as well due to bad caps or other similar problems.

RayBay

Sorry told you to look at my system specs and there were not filled out. They are now i guess i didn't have the birth date correct lol. Yah i will post if i ever have any issues. I have contacted Foxconn about my motherboard. The model num of my board dose not match the one that they have posted on there site. I am supposed to have 4GIG ram possible but the board in my machine is missing 2 ram slots. Hope it is a flaw and they will send me some **** but since there based in tiwian they prob wont give a ****.


My MOBO is FoxConn with AM2 socket

Many of the boards are Intel boards, made under license by Tri-Gem... they still look like the intel board until you know the codes. But they are manufacturered by Tri-Gem of Korea, and their failure rate after one year is extremely high.
Others have the Tri-Gem label.
Some are Intel processors and others are AMD... but the boards are all made in Korea... the computers are assembled in a number of countries... but all have the same brand name and model... this can be discerned by the model number and label on the back of the machines.
Do NOT assume that just because they are an Intel board, that they are safe and reliable... Many are licensed from Intel...

I'll bet that Intel never does that again.

emachines

I have an older emachines comp that did that it is no fun at all unless u have tons of extra computer parts laying arround!!! today i thought it would be fun to throw it togather i used a HP board and the emachines processor it WORKS!! so i am installing XP and what do you know it shut down just before it finished. I knew i should not have used that power supply with the set up but i did anyways and blew it up what a waste of the HP board! so yea DO NOT USE FACTORY EMACHINES "BESTEC"POWER SUPPLY!!!!

It is not the power supply. The Bestec is not great but works ok. It is the motherboard. As it ages, it curls and causes a short circuit that destroys both the motherboard and the power supply.... Lots of research has been done on this.

Read the post again. He wasn't even using an eMachines board.

He blamed using the Bestec PSU, wasting his HP board.

Jeesh.

I have replaced many Bestec power supplies in other computers like older HP's or Compaq's with great success... eMachines computers have always been trash, but people buy them because of their low prices. All computer manufactures are producing low end "eMachines like" computers now

Not like it matters, but here's my two cents:

I personally LIKE eMachines.

By no means will I sing their praises from mountaintops, but when people start to bash other peoples pc's I wonder if the problem really has anything to do with the hardware. Wink wink, nudge nudge, SAY NO MORE!

They are not Cray's, they're entry-level. And some people, like myself, don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yeah, I know that's a very "ye olde tyme" kinda saying, but it seems that some want to do exactly that. In every post where people are looking for help to just fix something that's gone afoul, somebody always says,"Give up, get a new computer, it's only $$$!".

That's what I bet anybody with large sums of cash to throw out the window on a whim would do. So you see, it's not really much of a "pointer".

Kinda like telling a pilot that that sky's blue.

And lastly, I think which model eMachines ya got makes a difference about whether your OS will work with a new board or not.

My T3958 seems to take anything, and the 4-disc recovery CD's work every time. Yes, I'm on my THIRD mobo. And planning a FOURTH.

But this time I'm doing it right, not just slapping in $15 used mobo's from the flea market or craig's. I'm going to buy a NEW(gasp!) mobo/PSU/SATA hard drive!

Which? Not sure yet. I'm angry I have to buy DDR2 RAM.
I just bought 2GB of Crucial PC2700! Dang!

And I may even change the CPU, but I'm so cheap, it would irritate me that I have a perfectly good Celeron D 340 DOING NOTHING in my house.

But it might be time to go to AM2 anyways.

Ok, that's enough rambling. And remember, your computer's BEAUTIFUL, no matter what they say, WORDS CAN'T BRI-ING ME DOOOWWWWN!

(lol, that was stooopid)

By God I Love This Thread...........

Because, Like my Emachines T-5026, it's immortal! (Well almost immortal).

If you install a Bestec PSU into a different computer and it takes out the motherboard, why wouldn't Emachines computers be junk? Beats the heck out of me, I'm just an end user.

If you get a dose of spyware in your Emachine, why wouldn't that be a bad motherboard? Beats the heck out of me, I reinstalled Windows, I guess that replaced the motherboard capacitors while it was reformatting :/C.....! Who says M$ hasn't thought of everything.

I'm not really using the T-5026 to write this post, it burned up long ago and this is just it's ghost I have connected to the internet! How's that for an extended warranty?

Let's suppose that this computer really does blow up tomorrow, (it'll be 4 years old this February 14th), how loudly and bitterly should I complain about that? How much does it owe me? It's obsolete now, so if it stays in working condition, the other "children" will only make fun of it anyway. "That P.O.S. can't play COD19, you need a 13 core processor and a one million GT graphics card". Can't you just hear the angels singing?

Emachines are built from the same parts that comprise HPs, Compacs, and Gateways. It's not really logical to accuse Emachines if a WD hard drive fails, now is it? Gee, I don't know, maybe it is, as I said before, I'm only an end user, what do I know.

Let's see now, my computer is 4 years old and it cost $570.00 (with a monitor and printer), if we subtract $130.00 bucks for the monitor and printer, that would be $480.00 for the desktop, or ten bucks a month. It doesn't seem like you could lease a machine for that price, now does it? Maybe Emachines are something akin to beer, which as everyone knows, you can't buy, you can only rent.

Every year PC worlds does a customer survey, and Emachines (for no apparent reason) gets good marks. See, all those other end users don't know jack either.

Maybe Gateway owns PCWorld mag. Being an end user, I can't possibly be expected to keep track of corporate entanglements, now can I?

Interestingly, in my machine the Bestec PSU (300 Watt) failed after only about 5 months. Well, it was about 99 degrees that day, in a non-airconditioned room. No matter, the box should work in July in Death Valley. See, Emachines are junk! Told ya! I replaced it with an Antec, (same 300 watts), it failed a year later, Emachine gets the blame for that also, but I can't figure out why. Again, I'm only an end user, don't expect epiphanies of thought from me. The wonderful thing here is that when I installed the Antec PSU, it repaired the motherboard, which everybody knows went bad and ruined the Bestec. Antec thinks of everything too! Hooray for Antec! Shame on you Emachines!

So, when the old unreliable T-5026 finally kicks the bucket, I'm going to retreat into a bitter rage- slash- deep depressional, abject, despondent funk, and ruminate about how many ways from Sunday I'm going to sue Gateway! When I'm done with them, their boardroom furniture will be in my livingroom, and that's that!

I've gotta close for now, I don't want my bad thoughts to ruin the motherboard in this clunker, at least not yet.

Y'all have a nice day, and buy a Dell, they're the best, or maybe a Compac, I'm still confused. HP is it then? Sometimes I feel so helpless, beings that I'm and end user an all that.

Bestec Power supplies ruin hardly any motherboards in HP, Compaq, or Gateway... Rarely do we see bad ones in our shop, unless somebody tries to upgrade the Video Graphics card beyond what the power supply can handle.

We have 23 years in the repair business... There are few consistent failures, but eMachines and Packard Bell have been consistently bad... though eMachines has made so many models that only 30 of them are really disasters... Some British computers are among this list of the most awful.