Was at Best Buy today.

eMachines
AMD Athlon XP 2300+ Processor
17" flat screen monitor
Lexmark color printer
speakers
128 mb DDR RAM memory
40 gigabyte hard drive
48X max CD-RW drive to burn CD's
I think it has a DVD player too....don't remember.
6 months free MSN if I want it too.

After several mail in rebates (kinda a pain in the a$$) it's $429.97

Then I keep seeing the Dell in T.V for $499. I have a small bonus coming next week and thought I'd get rid of this stupid slow computer I'm using now.

Opinions??

'Foul

YOu will be happy with that computer, unless you decide to deface someone with photoshop and publish a documentary on how you did with DVD studio.

Just kidding congradulations.

Yeah, I bought a Dell that was supposed to be a deal. Buying a computer from Dell is like ordering a pizza. Oh, would you like a modem? Any software? Extra ram? My "$699" computer ended up costing $1200. I'm not that crazy about the performance either.

I know that ccomputer would be a lot faster and easier to use than the one I am using now, but is that a decent COMPUTER, eMachine??? Is that a good processor vs. a Pentium??

I have not bought anything yet.

'Foul

I'm a die-hard fan of Dells, just because every company I've worked for has used them. The tech support is really great if you ever need it. As for my home PC, I have one similiar to what you have......only because it was cheap cheap If you decide to get the Dell you could surely sell the old one, heck I might even be interested. Or just keep it, you don't have that much in it really.

I hav enot shopped lately but 499 wth a flat sceen sound like a great deal does teh dell have a flat sreen also?

Check with internetishop.com.

Mike, I don't know crap about computers but when I bought my HP w/ 128k RAM and Windows XP, I was extremely unhappy. I added another 512K and it seems a lot better. I was told XP takes a lot more memory to run. Might want to confirm this though, I may be full of it.

When I was puter shopping, my brother the geek steered me away from e machines. It's the only one he specifically told me to stay away from.

Usually just a lurker but I have some shopping time in on this subject.

I have an e-machine PC and was leary at first because they were so cheap. Talked to a friend that is a computer engineer and he told me the intel celeron (e machine) processor and the pentium are the same thing with different names. I have had that emachine for almost 4 years with no problems whatsoever. Been a great PC for the money. The only drawback of emachines is the towers generally don't have a lot of extra room, so make sure you get everything internal in it that you want. I had enough room to add a burner (didn't come with one) but tower is full now.

I have a dell laptop. It is a good laptop and customer support is fairly good but it has to be because I have had about 5 or 6 problems with it in less than a year (little problems but required tech visits). I saw a study a couple of months ago that said Gateways and Dell's have the most problems. I have been much happier with the Dell laptop than I was with my last HP laptop. I lost 3 hard drives in the HP in 1 year.

All in all both emachines and DEll are good but from my experience emachine gets the nod. Also, Best Buy has always been great to work with when problems do arrive on other electronics but I have had NO problems with the emachine.

My .02.