The Land Of The Proverbial "True Bargain"!
Written: Jun 28 '03 (Updated Aug 01 '04)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
| Quality of Tech Support: |
|
|
|
Pros: Good not great quality. Extremely economical. Lots of freebies! A reliable industry workhorse!
Cons: DVD ROM burned out after a year. Perhaps a bit less responsive than costlier units.
The Bottom Line: If you desire a very good low cost quality PC with some nice extras and good reliability, then here is your machine!
|
|
|
| sam-pro's Full Review: eMachines etower 633ids PC Desktop |
The ongoing search for the "poor man's bargain" has kept my inner motivation for saving money at full speed for quite sometime now and I love it! There is a certain feeling of personal satisfaction to be had when one such as you or I stumble upon something quite rare indeed for our hard earned money!
Having a rather sizable family such as myself simply puts one in the position of not being able to pick and choose a PC quite so easily! Price, reliability and basic performance functions certainly have to be given full consideration when making an important investment of this nature. Any preconceived ideas of "you get what you pay for" have to be filed somewhere else [probably the local dump!]. If you can get a few extras to boot...well then all the more power to you!
Such was my situation back in late December of 2000 when the family desperately needed a new home computer! The old one which was slapped together with various parts from used machines by my younger brother [the expert!] had finally failed and coupled with the fact that it only boasted a 4 GB hard drive that burned itself out...well this was only the final nail in the coffin. So it was off to the nearby Best Buy we go!
The store itself at that time was relatively new to our area and was running a major post Christmas clearance sale on PC's. Ah, my mission was set before me on this given fine Friday evening! There was no room for failure!
As most PC's were around the $1000 price complete with monitor, for about half the price of the other top brands stood this very nice e-tower by emachines! I had heard of this co.'s attempt to offer the public pc's at considerably lower prices on tv. They do this simply by using massed produced drives by generic brands that lower production costs. Fine by me!
The eMachines etower 633ids is indeed the pc I woundup with that night at a very reasonable price that was further lowered with a 30 month contract with MSN as our internet dial-up provider. The deal was if you purchased the unit with MSN as your dial up service, you would instantly receive a $400 rebate off your purchase at the checkout! The monthly fee would be $21.95. That seemed quite nice at the time but the situation wasn't all that it was cracked up to be...ah, but that is subject matter for a forthcoming separate review!
etower 633ids
Key Features
Installed Memory 64 MB (SDRAM)
Operating System Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition
Processor Intel Celeron 633 MHz
Recommended Use Small Business, Home Use
Memory
Installed Cache Memory 128 KB
Installed RAM 64 MB
Max. Cache Memory 128 KB
Maximum RAM 256 MB
RAM Technology SDRAM
56K Modem
The first concern after making the purchase was...would the machine work...and indeed it did! A generic 17" monitor was included with the deal. It hooked up to the computer via its video connector on the rear of the machine very easily and the installed Windows Me program immediately recognized the new device on initial startup and used the INSTALL WIZARD to find a suitable driver which it did! The monitor was very clear and ready within seconds.
Eventually, we hooked up to MSN and the internet and 56K modem worked together very well with the following exception: If you have AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger and a music share website all operating at the same time the computer could lockup on you and you will have to restart by holding down the green Power button, then wait 20 seconds and push the power button again to restart. This usually happens to my daughter who is constantly online with her friends while simultaneously downloading music and games. She simply gives the computer too many commands at once! She has since learned to chill a bit.
Outside of a little sluggishness while the 56K Modem is hooked up to the internet, the machine has been an extremely reliable performer and I have learned much since its purchase!
Incidentally, the supplied emachines keyboard is most easy to operate and does not at all feel awkward like some others. I really like the fact that no less than 14 little green "Iinstant Access Buttons" are located at the top marked "Banking", "Brokerage", "Pay Bills", "News", "Sports", "Travel", "Shopping", "Tickets", "Music", "Health", "Greetings", "Games", "Auctions" and "My Site" which all can be set quite easily to get you to your favorite sites easily!
If you really do not wish to bother with the buttons you have the option of just using one touch tiles in WINDOWS or thy emachines internet tiles. At any rate, versatility is this very nicely thought out computer's forte aside from its very reasonable price tag!
My only criticism with the unit was that the DVD ROM simply burned itself out at the one year mark! No problem as I replaced the Samsung made drive with a Liteon DVD model on sale for $69. It has worked well now for almost two years!
This brings me to another point. I really like the fact that emachines gives you two expansion slots on the rear and an extra slot in front for another drive like a CD burner! Don't worry about the inside IDE cable as it has an extra terminal for easy hookup! My Philips burner installed easily! I use the two rear slots for my 1394 FIREWIRE terminals to the digital cam I own.
The supplied Owner's Manual is very nicely written with easy to understand step by step instructions for restoring your hard drive or installing new hardware. The computer uses the "Cable Select" position for whatever hardware you want to add to the unit! It really is a nice way for the computer tinkerer to go when purchasing a machine! One can simply buildup quite a nice tower!
If you are not into fixing or replacing drives, then emachines will either repair the defective drive or replace the entire computer for a fee in about 2 to 4 weeks. I simply replaced my defective DVD drive myself as we cannot afford to be minus the computer for more than a few days!
I know there are many things that I have not touched upon but I have tried to give you a basic idea of what to expect from this machine. Both the newer model and this one are still being sold for even less now...under $400 w/monitor at the local computer store and I will have no problem buying my next computer there and you can bet it will be the very reliable emachines model!
Look, I realize that in the world of computers that today's model is obsolete tomorrow but this computer has been a real workhorse for my rather large family and easily runs twenty hours a day...365 days a year! It is now well over 2 1/2 years old and we have been delighted with it! The only reason I gave it four stars instead of five was because of the somewhat early retired DVD drive.
I can only caution you about a seemingly certain incompatibility with Lexmark printers so please consider a Canon or Epson printer for this model as I found the setup software to be questionable on the Lexmark unit we purchased. It eventually was replaced by a Canon which took right away!
I've heard at least one expert say that he does not care for the Intel CELERON processor used on these massed produced generic units but I really have found it to be very sufficient! Offline and maintenance programs work very quickly!
The 15 GB hard drive is fine but I did upgrade to the higher 40GB drive when it went on sale. This gives me more storage for digital videos and pictures which require an appreciable amount of space!
The online support by emachines is good and updates are constantly available. Although MSN was our ISP we have decided not to renew the service despite the savings during the initial purchase. Their filtering of pornography and other items like pop-up ads is horrible not to mention their so called MSN 8 fancy shmantsy program that constantly caused errors on the computer.
Since the end of our contract we have been most pleased with People PC Online which is simple and great! It is also very reasonable and beats MSN's stupid Junk Mail Filtering system easily. I had to restore the computer with the supplied Restore Discs a few times because of faulty MSN programming but that is subject matter for a forthcoming review.
Emachines used to have their own ISP but have contracted out to another ISP since. I believe it is EARTHLINK.COM. Just stay away from MSN if you can. I am grateful for the rebate but it really was not worth selling my soul to MSN for 2 1/2 years!
Some friends of mine have purchased Compaqs, Dells and even Mac's that gave them serious problems. Now I'm not saying that these brands are no good or guaranteed to give you nightmares but it is most interesting that all of our friends and family have been most impressed by this emachines model...especially at half the price of the others!
The green "e" ICON on the front of the tower has come to mean good reliable quality to me and I would have no problem buying another when the time comes! Thank you for your time and God bless you!...Peter
UPDATE: 8/1/2004:
Gateway recently purchased the "eMACHINES" co.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 563
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Celeron
Processor speed: 601-700
RAM: 64
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
sam-pro
|
 - Top 500 |
|
Member: Peter J Sammon II
Location: The Bloomfield Burying Ground, USA
Reviews written: 218
Trusted by: 121 members
About Me:
Every once in awhile something great arrives at relatively low cost to you...Priceless!
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.