This little story starts off in Fort Bragg, NC. Four army friends and I are getting ready to deploy to Iraq for a year, and want to buy notebooks to allow for some diversions during our downtime. We settle upon the M6800 series notebooks, thinking that you cant do TOO much wrong with a 64-bit Athlon and a Radeon 9600.
Boy, were we wrong.
Out of the 5 notebooks, we have had 3 failed power supplies, 3 sets of cracked hinges, 4 bad RAM sticks, 2 notebooks who cannot handle more than one USB device at once, many MANY wasted hours dealing with the SP2/BIOS bullcrap, Many MORE hours figuring out that anything other than windows USB drivers will kill the computers, 15 or so reinstalls of windows because of various issues described above, and assorted other problems I am too annoyed to remember at this time. My computer? Wont stay on for more than 20 minutes without a BSOD, and thats with a fresh install of XP and known-good RAM, Optical Drive, and Card Reader.
Another fun case: One computer is unstable when ANYTHING is plugged into the USB ports. A nice telltale sign, call it a 2-minute warning, is when the USB mouse stops working. Just shuts down. As soon as that happens, you better be ready to save any documents or games, because you're going to get a visit from the reboot fairy.
Of course, since we have all been in Iraq all year, jumping camps from month to month, We cannot RMA, because there is little to no chance of ever seeing our notebooks again, due to the goatf**k that is the US Army postal service.
Bottom line: EMachines has upheld its standing as the worst distributor of computer equipment in the industry, and as of late, Gateway is not lagging too far behind. I have never in my life (aside from the IBM DeathStar hard drive incident) experienced such a consistent lack of quality in any brand name computer product. Hell, even Packard Bell is a step up from this steaming pile of fecal matter.
Boy, were we wrong.
Out of the 5 notebooks, we have had 3 failed power supplies, 3 sets of cracked hinges, 4 bad RAM sticks, 2 notebooks who cannot handle more than one USB device at once, many MANY wasted hours dealing with the SP2/BIOS bullcrap, Many MORE hours figuring out that anything other than windows USB drivers will kill the computers, 15 or so reinstalls of windows because of various issues described above, and assorted other problems I am too annoyed to remember at this time. My computer? Wont stay on for more than 20 minutes without a BSOD, and thats with a fresh install of XP and known-good RAM, Optical Drive, and Card Reader.
Another fun case: One computer is unstable when ANYTHING is plugged into the USB ports. A nice telltale sign, call it a 2-minute warning, is when the USB mouse stops working. Just shuts down. As soon as that happens, you better be ready to save any documents or games, because you're going to get a visit from the reboot fairy.
Of course, since we have all been in Iraq all year, jumping camps from month to month, We cannot RMA, because there is little to no chance of ever seeing our notebooks again, due to the goatf**k that is the US Army postal service.
Bottom line: EMachines has upheld its standing as the worst distributor of computer equipment in the industry, and as of late, Gateway is not lagging too far behind. I have never in my life (aside from the IBM DeathStar hard drive incident) experienced such a consistent lack of quality in any brand name computer product. Hell, even Packard Bell is a step up from this steaming pile of fecal matter.
). The 68xx series from eMachines sure did have some telltale problems, but overall it was a really good laptop for the money. Gateway seems to have corrected most of those issues with the 7xxx line. I'm certainly happy with mine.
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) but mine doesn't have and never has had the flickering. I have had my machine since ~April of 2004. I have also had no power brick or USB issues. The only issue I have had with mine is cracked hinge covers (x2). This machine has seen heavy use daily since purchased over a year and a half ago.
