Hi, Wirt
Happy Friday

I saw the sales e-machine/500 with 17" Monitor for $99(After Rebates) in Fry's Electronics Last week.
In same Ad. 15" Monitor for sale $119.
Whole machine is cheaper than Smaller size of Monitor?
Make sense??? 

Peter C.
>>> Wirt Atmar <[log in to unmask]> 06/15/00 11:43AM >>>
To revive a thread from March of last year, I mentioned then that I bought a
$399 e-machine (the e300k), following Gavin's recommendation.

My posting at the time was perhaps a little overenthusiastic. As time went
on, I began to hold the machine in less and less regard -- and all of the PCs
that we have bought since then have been back in the $1000 category (Dells,
HPs, etc.).

[In that regard, let me the strongest mixed review I possibly could to the HP
Pavilion. We bought two of them, but essentially neither one of them worked
from the first day. HP puts so much extra crap on top of the Windows software
that it just killed the performance of the 500MHz devices and made them
unusable. Indeed, no one here would use them, they were so miserable to work
with. Eventually, I decided just to bite the bullet and rebuild their
operating systems from scratch, having to take the machines completely apart,
find the part numbers and the manufacturers of all of their innards and track
down all of the appropriate drivers. I couldn't use the bootable CD that HP
supplied because it put all that &^#$*# crap back into the operating system.

However, in the process of taking them apart, I was sincerely impressed with
the physical quality of the devices. And now that they're back up and
running, after scrubbing the hard drives clean and using a standard Windows
CD supplied with our Dell PCs to rebuild the devices from scratch (a ten-hour
process), they're really a delight to use. If you're looking for a
particularly well-designed PC -- and an adventure in computing to boot -- let
me recommend the HP Pavilion series.]

But returning to the story, a few days ago, the power supply in the e-machine
300k died. I've now come to consider having a PC right next to each of our
HP3000s an essential item, and that's what the e-machine was being used for
(and also as an auxiliary processor, letting us FTP PostScript files to the
PC for distillation and then being re-FTP'ed back into the HP3000).

Because I was no longer impressed with the e-machine after a year's usage, I
looked around for other cheap PCs, most seriously considering Compaq's iPAQ
PCs, the cheapest of which is in the same general range, $499 -- but it's
described as "legacy free" PC (a spectacular marketing phrase if there ever
was one), meaning that it doesn't come with any of the standard ports.

Ultimately, I decided that cheap won out over better for this particular
task, but where cheap also meant complete, so I ordered another $399
e-machine, this time a 500is, a 500MHz Celeron-based device.

Let me say that I'm impressed. It arrived yesterday, and it was extremely
simple to set up (after deleting some of the same kind of shopping-channel
crap that HP puts into the Pavilion). I took the memory out of the now-dead
300k and put it into the new machine, along with the NIC card, downloaded all
of the standard software, including HP JetAdmin network printing software,
and kazaam, it was up in running in just an hour or two.

The sound is much better in this device, as is the video. The case is more
attractively and solidly constructed and its much quieter, with twice as much
disc (4GB vs. 2GB). But more important than anything else, this little PC is
snappy, the way that the other 500MHz PCs are. For $399, I'm really quite
impressed and pleased. I'm planning on buying a few more of them in a few
days. A PC for $400 is half the price that HP used to want to sell us
terminals for.

The only worry is that the new machine has the same power supply in it as did
the previous machine. If it doesn't last any longer than did the previous
one, it appears I'm going to have to buy a few of those too. I found the
wholesale price on the power supply to be $24, so if you had to, you could
consider them to be part of the price of doing business (they're only held in
with 3 screws and their replacement takes only about 10 minutes), but I'm
hoping for the best.

Wirt Atmar