LGR - Tech Tales - eMachines: Never Obsolete?

16:9, very small though and only capable of 1440x900 which sucks these days. Maybe someday I will win the lottery ;) I got these on Craigslist for a whole $80!

Mike Mason

Thanks very much!

LGR

Sweet! Keep rocking that thing as long as you can :)

LGR

Hehe, the good old Intel Celery.

LGR

As far as I know they were primarily a North American brand! Although I know they were also sold in certain European stores, like Dynabyte in the Netherlands

LGR

That's awesome, actually. Ran across these eMonster listings while researching the episode: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20000815062821/http://www.e4me.com/infocentral/product_emonster550r.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20000815062821/http://www.e4me.com/infocentral/product_emonster550r.html</a>

LGR

Yeah, everything from the mobo to the PSU seemed to be plagued with bad caps on earlier eMachines

LGR

Oh yeah, Gateway will get its own episode at some point. I have more personal experience with them anyway.

LGR

You're quite welcome :)

LGR

Happy to hear it!

LGR

Haha, nice! 4:3 or 16:9?

LGR

archive.org's Wayback Machine is a great resource!

LGR

The comments seem to be equal parts happy nostalgia and lasting rage when it comes to Emachines, haha. Definitely depends on luck and which machine you chose it seems.

LGR

I remember when these came out - they had that 300mhz cacheless Celeron processor and were surprisingly good for what they cost. I think if I remember correctly we bought a bunch of these for work at around $500 each - unheard of price in 1998.

Lon Seidman

Wow, I never knew that about the company. This gives me a newfound appreciation for my current eMachines desktop!

Jess the Stampede

Same. I don't recall ever heard about them in Australia. I wonder if people ever got value out of the upgrade offer?

Gary Leigh

Though I build my own machines now, there was a time when I bought low-cost, off-the-shelf PCs like these. Somehow, I never owned an eMachines PC, but I do remember seeing them everywhere, and did use them on occasion. It's easy to see how they reached success with price points like that. I'm not surprised that Acer were the ones to buy them, as they're definitely the torch carrier for low-cost PCs today. Great job on the history, as always!

I don't think they were ever sold here (Norway)

John Arild Lolland

You must be a young'in.

Kenneth

I have never heard about eMachines before, but it was still an interesting video.

John Arild Lolland

Believe it or not, one of the best machines I owned was a eMachine eMonster 500. It was a P-III 500 MHz with a Voodoo 3 video card. I also upgrade it to the max RAM. It was a screaming machine! And it lasted years.

Kenneth

I'm still using an old eMachines tower like the one in your thumbnail as my TV/media PC and file server. Most of the internal parts (except motherboard) are not the originals. A lot of them had bad capacitors, but luckily not this one.

Zabe

To state the obvious ... now you have to do a show on Gateway! Ahem Gateway 2000 I should say ...

Kevin Furr

This is better than anything on network TV!

Kevin Furr

I loved this, an eMachines was not my first computer, that was a Windows 95 computer made by a bunch of no name companies, but it was the one I had in my room at a more mature age when I could enjoy it. Man I spent so many hours playing the Sims 2 and discovering what Youtube was it really as not that bad of a machine, I think of them as cheap, but for most people, including my family, it was what we could afford and for us it was great a simple cheap computer that lasted just long enough to upgrade. Thanks for bringing back those memories.

Cody Fulcher

Tech Tales is quickly becoming my favorite series!

mavrick

Watched this on my pair of matching eMachines LCD monitors. :)

Mike Mason

Memories, memories, memories. An Emachines computer in 2002/2003 was the first computer I specifically owned, and it was great for a growing child like me. Wasn't one of the AMD models, but it was a nice thing in and of itself, at least until the motherboard started to sputter and had to be completely replaced with an alternative Gigabyte mobo. Still, that stuck around until I built my own computer in late 2007, components of which I still use in my desktop today.

Curus Keel

Wow, that company certainly went through a roller coaster of extreme success and failure... kind of had a quiet death, though, it seems. Also, I love seeing old websites like the ones you featured in this video. It's funny the internet has been around so long that we are now nostalgic about the internet as it was back in the day, especially the time where it started becoming mainstream!

Lindsay Michelle

Well that was certainly interesting! Never had an eMachine but I recall seeing the 'Never Obsolete' sticker on the front. Definitely learned more about that from this video!

ReeseRiverson

Ahh, eMachines. Not my first computer, but it was my second. I had an eTower 533i, which came bundled with adware-I mean EXCLUSIVE MONEY-SAVING COUPON SOFTWARE! It wasn't a bad machine though, and it was extremely reliable. Just... Not very expandable. It marked the very first time I'd hung a hard drive loose in a computer chassis, because there simply weren't any mounts for a second. But man, that front-panel gameport! It made using my Gravis GamePad Pro so much easier. Really, what eMachines did for the computer market cannot be overstated. The combination of low cost and aggressive marketing catapulted the computer industry forward from an expensive toy to an affordable family appliance. It's just too bad they started to go waaaaay downhill not long after being acquired by Gateway. I can't tell you how many ultracheap eMachines PC's came in with a defective power supply that not only often blew everything else in the system, but also had proprietary wiring, making simple replacement impossible. Worse, the motherboard also had proprietary mounts that couldn't be rearranged. That telltale floppy light told the whole story every time someone brought one in. So many people who really couldn't afford this kind of failure had to bite the bullet hard on that one. Eventually, we got a contract from EasyHome, a "rent-to-own" shop where people pay a weekly fee for things they really can't afford (and in the process pay 200%+ for it in the long run), and guess what kind of computer they "sold" most often... Oh, eMachines. You'll be remembered for many things, but sadly, not very nostalgically for most.

Runefox