If you own an Emachine, read this now!

At Howards request, the following is a list of links that are damning evidence to show that it is the bestec psu's rather than the mobo's that are the cause of most if not all emachine failures!!

http://www.howtofixcomputers.com/bb/sutra871801.html
http://www.resellerratings.com/store/Emachines
http://www.pcbuyerbeware.co.uk/MBoard3.htm
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic59517.html
http://www.computing.net/hardware/wwwboard/forum/46170.html
http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?p=376869#post376869 - raybay's post #30


I await raybay's response with baited breath!

Just about all of them made assumptions about the cause, because failure was so prevalent. Ask they if they had engineers take down the boards and the power supplies to study the problem, and they will say no. We have used engineers, certified engineers.
The problem began with the machines made in 1999, 2000, 2001, and early 2002, when they DID have large numbers of power supply failures, so the assumption was made that it continued.
But when the problems occurred with several other eMachines power supplies, it was clear this was not the same problem.
We have the boards, we have the power supplies, we have the cases. In these 14 models, and presumably in the other 9 high-failure boards, we are so certain it is the board, that we have engineers who will testify in court..
Further, we have tracked down the failures to defective capacitors in some, defective Southbridge in others, and defective board assembly in others.
We will not continue this discussion, except to suggest you examine your boards closely.
On these failed machines:
Most owners who replace their power supplies DO NOT save their machines. Most power supplies are still good after the motherboard fails, and yet do not get tested.
The failures are the highest in the history of modern computers. Only Packard Bell has had such bad numbers, and they went out of business in the US.
The real problem is that eMachines knew they had a problem with the board, and previously with the power supply. Many which failed were replaced under warranty. But they knew that most would fail after the warranty expired. They did nothing. It would have cost them perhaps $35 to $40 for replacement boards... or they could have offered the owners a deal where the owner paid tech costs.
eMachines had huge contracts with Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and many other discounters... so most people who bought them didn't understand their rights, when they only had a one-year warranty.
eMachines went broke. They sold out to Gateway.
We challenge you to name any other computer anywhere with such a disastrous failure rate...
Even if it was the power supply on some, to have nothing done when the company knew is unforgivable.
Today their are thousands, perhaps multiple-thousands of people on budgets whose computers will fail.
Nothing can be done except to replace the motherboard at a cost of $159.95 to $221.95. Nothing is fixed when you replace the $27 power supply. The board still fails.
If you have NOT yourself seen a lot of these failed eMachines computers, you do not understand the magnitude of the problem.
Enough said.

You have STILL not supplied any evidence of what you claim.

Raybay, i am posting again because you have not seen fit to answer my previous post.

You say that none of the pc's in the links i provided were tested by engineers! To date we have seen absolutely now proof whatsoever that you have used engineers.

You say quote "We have used engineers, certified engineers" but you still have provided no proof. Who are your engineers? What qualifications do they have? What certificates do they possess? What test equipment and procedures do they use?

All you have provided to date is your opinion. Now I'm not saying that you are not entitled to your opinion, but, even just a single link from you would perhaps give us all something to think about.

Repeating the same information over and over again and using we instead of i does not constitute proof in any way.

The sad thing is, this thread was never intended to be a debate. I started this thread off in the hope of informing people that were unfortunate enough to have purchased an emachine that they have serious problems and that a new psu as a preventative measure would be a good idea.

I had mines come with one and i've had it for 3 years without cleaning and i do alot of gaming on it. i have an Emachine T2460

Greetings,

I replaced the MB of an "eMachine" with a new ASRock P4i65G. Without reformatting the HD which already has Windows XP Home on it I plugged it in and booted up. The machine will go through POST and recognize the hardware, but windows won't boot. I get an error message that says Windows won't start and may be because of new hardware or system crash. I have the option to boot in safe mode, boot normal, safe mode with networking. No matter which of these items I select the system will start to reboot and come back to this screen. Do I have to reformat and reload windows or is there a way around this?

You will need to re-install windows and there is no way around it. Before you do it, have a read of post#22 before you make a start on it.

Didn't want to have to do that but thanks. I've been racking my brains trying to find a way around that.

Emachines PC's power supplies are only 250 watts, so if you add any card or other peripherals such as dvd, the power supply cannot handle it so it burns out and most of the time it takes the MB with it. It happened to me and that time Best Buy would not honour the warranty.
Therefore, NEVER Best Buy again and NEVER Emachines again
As mentioned, there are several threads on this and I do not know why people still buy Emachines.

"As mentioned, there are several threads on this and I do not know why people still buy Emachines."

Two reasons:
1. The buyers of Emachines are 97% computer illerate... and
2. Emachines computers are cheap and full of "false" good specifications and perks

Most Emachines systems are generic Mini-ATX towers. Repalce the crap power supplies and motherboards with better grade parts, and the processors, hard drives, and memory are usually good enough. Some of the PCI modems are crap

I had the eMachines T2692 and mine did the same as the others. The CPU light would be on, but nothing else happened. I wanted to upgrade to a better mobo and cpu so I did it at that time. I gave my uncle the original PS from the emachines in question last year when the original mobo went poof and he hasn't had any problems out of the PS yet. The original setup I had in my emachines T2692 lasted me almost 2 years. It lasted longer than I thought it would.

i had a emachines t 1840 tower and well it lasted far longer then most of the comps ove seenon here. it went for about 3.9 years which isnt bad. but yea then one day all of a sudden it started acting up..... the PSU would not power up.... or do anything, and a new PSu was not gettting any action from my mobo... so yea.. junked it all..... cept my hdd and ram, cd drives... luckly i had another PSu from my HP x2 4200+, had to buy a new one cuz the 400 watt wasnt strong enough for my 7800GTX got a 535 instead... so i buaght new mobo, 3.0ghz cpu and a 256mb XFX6800 agp card, and im back up in running, of course had soeme help with a friend with XP, had a disk which would work on any computer.

BBUt be warned CPU AND MOBO WILL GO!!

o yea and it friend my original 40gb hdd which came with the computer too

I would be interested in knowing which models you have that are affected...could you provide any model numbers, i.e., T2686, H2642, etc.?

sweet

thats awsome, congratz on the research to finding out its the mobo and not the PSU, well i know one model were it is bad, t1840... cuz it went... cuz i remeber when i turned it on the lights dimmed real quick, and then bam comp was dead..... then psu gone, hdd gone, mb gone.... not sure on my video card since i dont use it i got a new one... ram was ok though

Oh! What should I do?

My mother board got fried.So I changed the mother board and processor.When I tried to turn on the computer,it asked me to activate the windows.In activation window,my installation ID has only 2 digits in the last group.Can someone help me with that.PLEASE.It's e-machine.
Thanks.

Dead H2602, new PSU fix it

PSU was the problem for my eMachine H2602....Just wanted to say that.

We have this same problem with our E-Machine computer. It's a T2625. It kept turning off on it's own and acting strange, finally it just quit and we replaced the power supply and it worked briefly but then didn't work again. The motherboard did go out with it. The motherboard has been discontinued but we found one online and ordered it because emachines wanted $160 for the replacement kit for the motherboard and now it still doesn't work. You can hear everything running but there is no video output at all. We have tried alot of different things and still nothing. Could the processor and/or RAM be bad too?? Also it currently has an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13 GHz) processor in it now and for RAM it's got 512 MB DDR (PC2100) in it. If we go ahead and buy a new processor and RAM just to try, how do we find what's compatible for this computer?? Thanks!!
Laurie

From my understanding, new motherboard means new computer. So you will need to purchase a new copy of windows.

Laurie,
it is possible that the "new" motherboard is also bad... Your processor and RAM are most likely good. What on-line store did you use?

Whats a good site to buy a good PSU, and also what's a good brand. I need a new PSU (emachines..), I'm getting lots of crashes and have been told to get a new PSU.