eMachines T5048

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Very slow
Design	Poor
Manufacturer Support	Needs improvement
Ease of use	Awkward
Value For Money	Poor

Advantages:	low price (but this glimmer of hope is eradicated when it goes wrong)
Disadvantages:	poor specification, not reliable, poor manufacturer support

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

I'll start this review by saying do yourself a favour and don't. Please don't. This is my idea of computing hell and my dad bought it. The mouse is behind the curve for a modern computer. A ball mouse. When you are used to optical mice and lasers, it seems incredibly unresponsive and this gets rather annoying. The keyboard is merely average but nothing to complain about, especially from a system of this price. However, the main horror is the computer itself. The pentium 4 processor looks rather pathetic in the midst of today's dual and quad core models and 512Mb of RAM is stingy even at this price point.

The main problem isn't even the specification, it is the reliability. The hard drive began to die very quickly but because when we took the machine back to shop we bought it from, it booted. So we could get anything done even with screenshots of the bios showing no hard drive. To this day, the matter still hasn't been resolved so a linux live CD is kept by it at all times.

This isn't even an isolated incident, I have read reports of motherboard failures and various other things on Emachines' systems. Don't just avoid this model, avoiding the manufacturer would do you a lot of good as well.

This computer may be cheap but it certainly isn't cheerful. Don't let the price draw you in, much better value can be found from cheap, reliable machines from good manufacturers.