Avoid the M68xx Like the PLAGUE - Page 2  

swaaye

I feel bad for you guys with this problem. I dont think however, that anyone that has the problem just dismisses it. I for one would have a huge problem with screen flicker!

I hope that you get your problems resoved and get to finally enjoy your laptop as I have.

Good Luck,

Hyestar


P.S: I had a Dell Inspiron 3500 before this laptop and the main reason I had to replace it (even though it WAS 7 years old!) was because the screen finally went from an occasional flicker to just plain dead! I took it apart and thought I might be able to fix it, but all my efforts failed. It was very fustrating, but somehwhat understandable because of the age of the laptop. I know how you feel though, screen problems suck. As for the power supply, I went thru 2 with the dell. I think they do go from time to time. With my emachines, I have not had a problem yet. (and hopefully wont! )

QFT. when i was working there still i never talked to anyone with a flickering problem that was just "blowing it off". and i hardly agree that all the machnies have the problem. we had probably 3 or 4 of the machines at my work for various things, they never had the flickering problem. thunder doesnt have it. my machine doesnt have it. Arima reported to us at one point that there was a problem in the ATI drivers where the flickering was becing caused by PowerPlay some of the time and not the inverter (their machine they used when they sent us photos they had replaced the inverter and it still did it, then disabling PowerPlay it stopped).

the only problem ive had with mine was the bad video card it had when I first got it. sent it in and got it back a week later and it's been perfect since then. no dead pixels, no cracked hinges, no flickering (and i go all over the place with my brightness depending on what im doing so i can tell when the light levels change)

i wish i was lucky as anaconda and thunder

aside from the hinge crack, the screen flicker, and a problem that my computer overheats like there is no tomorrow. must have happened 5 times today. for the most part, i wasnt doing anything too intensive (tivo2go with wordprocessing and internet browsing), but if i fire up my dvr software, boom good night. and to top it off, for some reason i can no longer burn DVD+RW. dont know why, always get disc errors.

the crappy thing is, i took it in to bestbuy in august for these same problems. they repasted the processor and said they couldnt find what was causing the flicker, but it was gone when they put it back togeather.

then in september/october, it took bestbuy 4 weeks to replace a keyboard. couldn't believe it, should have taken 15 minutes, but they were backed up so whatever

now, its just nuts. i wish i could take it in tomorrow, but it has to wait till december. tell me, other then being nice and polite, is there anything else you guys would suggest to grease the wheels to get a new machine. i like mine, but i cant afford to keep losing it to the same problems. worse case senerio, i will be able to invoke the lemon clause sometime early next year.

My sister didn't bother to RMA her notebook over the flicker. That tells me right there that most people probably don't.

1=most?

Neither did I. Had enough fun getting one faulty RAM replaced properly, and that is a lot more straight-forward job than fixing the screen flicker. Besides, I don't remember seeing anybody who reported sending the machine for screen fllicker and it was fixed permanently.

you guys will get a kick out of this

i went to talk to best buy today, to see what they could do for me. turns out, since they told me to get my hinge crack fixed by emachines myself, i only had 2 service issues on record. fine whatever, i just want my computer to work. but i didn't turn it in because i have an appellate brief due this week, as well as an access project, and finals in less then a month.

i had backed up this morning, swapped back in the stock components, and was working on my paper tonight when bam - windows crashed with some videocard problem. yeah, so i tried rebooting, no luck, no luck restoring my last working settings either. the thing is just messed up.

came home, tried re-installing system software, it was sucessful, but windows won't boot. swapped in my 7200 hitachi, same problem.

its like the thing died after i asked about the lemon clause. figures, because it is the worst time this could have happened to me.

oh well - back to best buy in the morning

austeros you may want to ask about that, i had a few Best Buys call in and inquire about getting repair histories faxed to them for any times the cusotmer had sent it in to eMachines directly so they could count those towards the lemon policy

hey pal, can you give me any more information? it probably doesn't matter much either way because i am sure there will be another problem with the machine down the line. guess i am just hoping that its messed up now, and they throw in the towel.

but hey if you could give me any more information, heck even if its just a number that i can call and see if emachines still has me on record, i would appreciate it.

hopefully, the biggest choice i will have to make is whether to risk another arma laptop, or get something 13.3, either a viao or one of the turinos . . .or maybe just ebay fodder and get one of the ferraris if i have student loan $ left over in the spring

The inverter in my 6805 looks like a chunk of hot glue now lol. I've wrapped the wires in electrical tape. I've crimped the connector pins. I've tried everything to hold that sucker immobile. It has definitely improved the flicker, but there is something in there that is just connected very poorly and VERY sensitive to its connection. Unbelievable.

I don't think anyone should defend these machines. Please sit back and read these comments instead. I'd say almost everyone with one of these machines has problems inevitably. You without troubles should SELL your machine ASAP, IMO. Before you have a headache over it and are stuck with an unsellable buggy machine.

@austeros, just have Best Buy call the eMachines corporate office and they'd be able to get it to them. this is of course up to the Best Buy tho if they want to do that thats why you'd want to ask them

@swaaye: this is a forum on the internet about computer problems. obviously, you're going to see problems on it, about every computer out there from all manufacturers. the majority of the people, the people who have no problems, are likely never to even see this forum. if you were to get comments from everyone that owns an emachines or gateway branded W730-K8, you'd find that those with problems other than cracked hinges (that ones pretty inevitable for the emachines branded ones, that's Arima's fault with their manufacturing equipement) is a very small minority.

Well, how about this Anaconda.

My sister and my dad have the 6805. Both have the same problems. Both were from different stores, different shipments. People have been complaining about the same problems on this forum for over a year now. The sticky thread about flicker is huge.

That says these machines are trouble.

Hell they shipped with a HORRIBLY broken BIOS that was incompatible with SP2! I have a P2-233 notebook running XP SP2 right now, and that machine is from 1999! And a Pentium III machine at home. And a Pentium PRO! Even a K6-3+ on a known-to-be-trouble MVP3-based board!

My sister accidentally installed SP2 and she had to wipe her machine and use the restore disks to get it working right again. I told her never to install SP2 and to disable auto updates. She's a grad student and doesn't have time for bullshit like this. Finally, eMachines brought out an official BIOS. I had been using ripped BIOSes from the newer machines for months but I didn't want to potentially void my sis's warranty. Why didn't eMachines get that BIOS out months sooner?

They also can hardly be upgraded reliably with respect to RAM. I had troubles with stability with two different RAM sticks. After hours of troubleshooting, I discovered that the internal slot is slightly more stable. I stuck my 1gig stick in there and left the "user serviceable" slot empty. Not the first time we've heard about this issue either. Read back a bit about people finding out which sticks don't work at all with 680x. I intentionally bought a Samsung stick to be sure they were the same make too.

The Cardbus controller is cheap trash that has issues with Audigy PCMCIA. The bad ACPI support in the troubled BIOS compounds this with stutters and static. Works perfectly in my Dell 9300.

Both my sister and I had our power bricks burn out within the same month of age!

Oh and 2 of the 3 machines I've seen have bad pixels. I had Best Buy crack open and let me check them for bad pixels. The first one I bought I didn't check with a black screen, just white. Oops. Second one I bought a few months later and I checked both white and black, found a dead pixel. Best Buy grabbed another from inventory for me and that one was OK. You must verify before you leave the store though or you're stuck with it unless it's just loaded with dead pixels.

Nice screen (if it's not flickering) and optical drive (quiet, fast, reliable) though! Realtek audio is decent for AC97 too.

My new Dell 9300 (sold 6805 to dad cuz I couldn't sell it on eBay with its probs, need to be on call on site lol) has been absolutely trouble free. I've been using it 7+ hours a day for 6 months now (I use it as my primary machine at work). It is an awesome machine. I've also been following the Dell Tech forum in addition to this one. People on the Dell forum are not having huge problems that are all the same. And you ain't seen support until you've seen what Dell's website can do for you! Dissassembly guide? Check. Drivers easily available? Check. Driver UPDATES? Check. Knowledge base? Check. Official Forum? CHECK! Easy to obtain replacement parts? CHECK!

eMachines' site is utter useless trash.

I bought the 6805 in Spring '04. I used it for a year. I pushed it hard with lots of games. I liked the machine even with its problems, but only because I consider myself an extremely advanced user that can do things like tweak PCI registers to get the crappy cardbus working better, and know that SP2 wasn't the problem, the BIOS was. And to know that the RAM I put in wasn't defective, it was the slot. And that I knew about this forum for common support among users. I regret voiding the warranty somewhat, considering the number of problems, and the potential for a bad mobo/usb. But from what I've read eMachines/Arima/Gateway support sucks ass at actually solving the problems anyway.

I don't see why you back up the 68xx series. They are trouble.

I had to send my 7422GX in for repairs, it completely died. It wasn't entirely out of the blue, my dog chewed on the power connector a lot and I could hear it sparking from time to time. I didn't point out the chew marks on the cord to the BB people and they didn't say anything about it, so off my unit went to Arima.

Since I can't be without a laptop, and I actually wanted something of an upgrade and the current 7xxx series is pretty much unavailable in the entire state, I picked up the latest and greatest Sony Vaio.

So now, after a bit of time to compare my Gateway vs. the Sony, and keeping in mind that I owned three of the 6xxx eMachines rigs, I have more respect for the engineering of these units. The more I look at this Sony, the harder it is for me to believe that people with engineering degrees came up with this.

The Gateway/eMac batteries are in the front and offcenter, a reasonable distance away from the heat generating components. The battery stays relatively cool, and this will help extend the battery life. The Sony's battery is right next to some component that is pumping out a lot of heat.

The Gateway/eMac exhausts are on the back. The Sony's are on the left side. The fans produce about the same level of noise, but because the sound from the fans on the Sony is RIGHT THERE, and not partially blocked by the screen, it drowns out the sound from the expensive Harmon/Kardon speakers they put in there. The relatively crappy speakers on the 6xxx/7xxx are preferable to me because I can actually hear them without straining the amp to the point of distortion.

The Sony engineers are apparently obsessed with symmetry. When you open the unit, you have this tiny little keyboard inside. There is plenty of room here, they could have added a full-size keypad or at least mimicked the main portion of a desktop keyboard, but they didn't. In order to do that, they would have had to offcenter the touchpad a bit to keep proper alignment. So, you wind up with this tiny little keyboard.

The battery is tiny, again apparently only to retain symmetry. A P-M that only gets a hair over an hour's battery life compared to a DTR AMD64 that gets over 2 hours is just a sham.

The casing that we all loved and adored with the 6xxx (sarcasm should be noted) has a sturdier feel than this Sony does.

To top it all off, I'm having a hard time getting this thing to give me the same performance experience I got from my 6809 out of the box. After the flaming I got in the Dell forum for even suggesting that an AMD64 had comparable performance to a P-M, I assuming this thing would be scary-fast. It isn't.

I no longer have any regrets about my 6xxx/7xxx purchase. I've used plenty of Dell laptops, and while they may not get repetitive problems like the 6xxx/7xxx laptops, it's pretty much a given that they'll get some sort of problem. At least with the 6xxx/7xxx series you have a reasonable idea of what you're getting into. A Dell is just a Pandora's box waiting for you to stumble on the latch.

I think the biggest problem with the Arima units is that their service team seems to be overly incompetent. I'm afraid of what condition my 7422GX will be returned to me in. Fortunately, the guys at my local Best Buy are stellar, so it will all be sorted out.

I had a Sony Vaio V505DX before my previous eMachines 6805. It was one of the tiny ones with Centrino and a ATI 9200SE.

It was an ok machine but it had problems with the touchpad cutting out. I didn't have any problems with it though other than that. The 6805 was far more trouble

The real point I was getting at is that taken in context with all notebooks in the world, the Arima units really aren't that awful. The 6xxx series was discontinued for a reason, and I have no doubts that it was at least partially due to these common issues. When something doesn't work, it's tough to see past that to what does work. Overall, I still think the Arima design has several points that other vendors would do well to emulate.

I feel that just like Intel's dual core and 64-bit extension processors, the early Arima AMD64 laptops were rush jobs to get in the market as fast as possible. We were early adopters, and we got burned for it. I suffered through cracked hinges and flickering screens just like you.

We had a rule at my last tech job that we would never be among the first 10,000 to buy anything. Early adopters always have and always will bear the brunt of problems. The price paid to be on the cutting edge isn't just financial. At least we were spared $2000+ costs to get these PCs.

so you had a few machines with problems, swaaye. so what. many are out there without problems.

mine had a problem with the video card when i got it. sent it in and got it repaired quickly and it's been flawless since.

i defend them because they are awesome machines. have been since they came out. if they hadn't, no way in hell would I have bought one a year after their debut.

the original BIOS had some ACPI issues that crashed the DEP in SP2. thats from the first release machines. the second quarter they were out they were already shipping with a BIOS that fixed that problem. they didnt release it to the public because BIOS updates can be trouble!! one mistake and foom theres a brick sitting there. but thats beside the point, Arima was updating the bad BIOS every time anyone shipped a machine into them for any repairs. and that ties back to what andevian said about early adopting tho. if anyone remembers, the 6805/07 was the first AMD64 notebook to come onto the market. and quite frainkly its held its own on that market. co-designed by Arima and eMachines, then used by Voodoo, Targus, and whoever else sold W730-K8's.

Bottom line, andevian, I've seen the other side. I was on the notebook support team from before these things even came out to the day I quit working there. I've searched through the database and looked at the numbers of times different reporting codes for different problems were entered into the database, and comparitively there werent that many. like i said, cracked hinges was the biggest problem. flickering was one that would show up every so often, didnt start showing up until a few months before I quit, but more often than not would be not an inverter problem but a Powerplay problem as ive mentioned before. I watched for things all the time. over all, there werent that many people with problems. you wanna know what the number 1 call was? peopel wondering how to turn their wireless card on (since its not a switch like on most notebooks). all the hardware problem calls paled in comparison to the number for that simple question. and below that would be various software problems (spyware, viruses, normal stuff), and then would be the relatively few number of people with hardware problems.this forum has people posting about problems, which is what this forum is here for. you're not going to see the people that have no problems. but trust me, they are out there, and they outnumber us many many times over.

like i said, I sure wouldnt have bought one if they were generally trouble.

I swear the people in the Dell forum have been drinking the laced Kool-Aid. They can't accept that anything not a.) Intel and b.)Dell is worth anything, and I still haven't figured if it's denial or sheer ignorance of what else is out theire on their part.

lol soon, soon that may change. Dell is selling boxed AMD64s on their site, an AMD64 machine from Dell may be just a stones throw away

P-M and A64 are quite competitive in performance, with A64 being a bit faster in some situations and a lot in a few. Both are exceptional for gaming.

P-M absolutely is far ahead for battery life, if you care about that. I do not. I bought a Inspiron 9300 for the 17" LCD and the 6800Go, and because Dothan is a beast for games just like A64.

There is no doubt about it though, Pentium-M is an amazingly efficient chip. My Dothan at 2.13GHz (27W) puts out less than half the heat of my 6805's 1.8GHz Clawhammer (62W) at full tilt. Machine runs a lot cooler and quieter. Needless to say the 2.13 P-M is faster than the 1.8 Clawhammer.

If I bought a desktop it would be a Athlon 64 for sure. Running a souped up 2.5Ghz AthlonXP at home right now.

There's a big leap between reselling retail boxed Athlon64s and becoming an OEM for Athlon64-based machines...