IBM Aptiva E 2158

This is a tricky one. I am an IT professional, but I bought a machine which most of my peers would not have touched. And I suppose only now I am getting frustrated. I bought the Aptiva from Comet for £999 last Christmas. PIII 500, DVD and 17" monitor was the criteria I set. It only had 64MB RAM, but that was ok for beginners. I bought it from Comet for the interest free credit. I still consider it a good deal. There was not much software with the machine - Lotus Smartsuite (which I would not use nowadays - our office uses MS Office, and it is so much easier to use the same). A few games were ... more

This opinionis for an Aptiva G40, of which is now 5 years old. When we fist brought the PC it worked fine and as I am only 13 back then I was 8 and did not know very much about PC's (just how to type and explore Windows) so I was not mucking around installing this deleting that, to be fair it was working fine, until I began to get interested in computers and the like before long I was buying magazines and installing software off the cover disks, and this is were it all went wrong, after instaaling a piece of software (Paint Shop Pro 5) I went on using it for 30 days then the demo timer said ... more

I was lucky enough to ckoose an Aptiva as my home PC around four years ago. I say lucky because I had considered various other machines, but went for the Aptiva in the end. While not the cheapest, or even the highest spec machine that I had to choose from, I was finally convinced by the fact that it was an IBM machine. IBM are a massive company, and working in the computer industry I know the vast amounts of money that they spend on research and development. This has been money well spent when it comes to the Aptiva series. In my workplace I have had three new machines since I bought the ... more

IBM provide a 30day up and running facility to get you started. Very useful as the modem was not configured from factory, for use in UK. However, as an experienced user of PCs I found most of the problems started after this period. My Hard Drive has been re-formatted (taking about 30 minutes) twice, but has been operating efficiently for abut 6 months. Hardware support is excellent, covered by a 12 month warranty. Manuals are basic, but a comprehensive windows-based help manual is available. Lifetime IBM on line support for as long you own the PC. ... more

I bought an Aptiva from Comet 2 years ago for £600 and I am very happy with it. Apart from using the windows 98 which came with the machine I don't use any of the other software package - Lotus smart suite, software selection - Lotus seems to be incompatible with office 97 which I use at work so I have office 97 installed also I have installed Clarisworks for its user friendly graphics capabilities mainly paint and draw. I have so far added to this machine with a 120mb memory card, network interface for my cable modem connection, cd rewriter, scanner, printer and webcam and it handles all of ... more