Hands-on review:

eMachines ET1331G-03W
desktop PC
(and Windows 7 64 bit)

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On 1-25-10 I bought a new personal computer. My first ever eMachines. An ET1331G-03W from Wal-Mart. I did not get the extended warranty.

I had to get a new PC because my old Windows XP Compaq Presario S4020WM desktop was a sinking ship, with glitches and slowdowns and crashes increasing in frequency and severity on almost a daily basis. I'd struggled with it for months trying to correct the problems, including adding RAM, and erasing the disk and re-installing XP from scratch.

I'd also tried migrating to Ubuntu via a second Compaq Presario S4020WM I possessed. But it turns out Ubuntu 9.10 is only around 50% as good as a Windows machine for what many non-geeks would need and want (Ubuntu is suitable for reconfiguring many old and slow Windows PCs into light duty, low maintenance web surfing/email stations though. I just needed lots more than that from my own personal workstation).

Hardware

I believe this model was built special for Wal-Mart.

And what a special deal it was! For $400 you got 6 GB RAM, a 750 GB SATA hard drive, a dual core, 2.7 GHz CPU, and a DVD-RW.

Other specs included VGA port, Ethernet, 6 USB ports, and 6 audio jacks (What the hell? I'm not an audio aficionado, so the presence of that many audio jacks baffles me). Heck: there's even two power amplified speakers included (powered via a USB connector)!

It also sports a plethora of card reader slots.

Expansion-wise, it can go up to 8 GB. And has internal space for at least a couple more drives (perhaps as many as four). It also has empty slots for three different varieties of PCI cards.

However, it likely has only a 250 watt power supply (though sources differ on this point), and so you might have to upgrade the power supply too if you did much significant expansion of the machine.

The built-in graphics circuitry supports at least 1600x1200 through the VGA port-- because that's what I currently have mine set to (and it uses 256 MB of my 6 GB RAM).

Some of this info came from Walmart eMachines eMachines ET1331G-03W Desktop PC with AMD Athlon II X2 Dual-Core Processor & Windows 7 Home Premium : Questions, Answers, How To, FAQs, Tips, Advice, Answers, Buying Guide and some from ET1331sp2 eMachines Support - Specifications.

I have not yet opened the case on the machine to verify any of this. But it should be pretty accurate.

You can peer in through some cooling vents to see the box appears largely empty inside.

This computer is amazingly quiet, compared to the last few I've owned/used. It's like a refrigerator or a freezer, with a muted hum. Except when you're burning a DVD. Significant use of the hard drive also makes a small noise, that's hard to describe. Maybe like the noise you'd hear of a baby lightly or quietly flicking the case with his fingers.

And you actually need the noise now, since many companies (like eMachines) no longer give you disk activity lights anymore. I miss those. For stuff like that comes in handy as warnings at times. At least for old geeks like me. For instance, they've alerted me before to suspicious activity on the part of malware, or failing hardware, or crashing software...

This machine is running 64 bit Windows Home 7 Premium.

At the time I was researching this deal, it couldn't be beat anywhere I looked. Not even by refurbished machines. Wow!

Online, I ran across quite a few people writing about this being an economical gaming system. That you could buy it, then replace the power supply with something bigger, and the onboard graphics with something better, and suddenly have a respectable budget gaming rig.

Of course, in a deal like this one, some corners definitely have to be cut somewhere.

The mouse is an old fashioned mechanical ball. Many (if not most) desktop PCs today seem to come with optical mice. Not this one. And there appears to be some marketing/advertising errors here and there that indicate this machine comes with an optical. But mine didn't. However, in my case this was no biggie, as I have an optical mouse to transfer over from my previous machine. Although as of the fourth day of ownership I haven't yet quit using the mechanical mouse.

(And last I checked optical mice were pretty cheap aftermarket accessories to buy anyway-- unless you simply insist on paying an extra $50 or whatever solely for a particular brand name)

The keyboard actually seems pretty decent. Although the first thing I noticed upon unpacking was that the letters on the keys appear to be glued on decals rather than the molded in characters I'm accustomed to seeing on PC brands like Sony, HP, and Compaq. Decals reminiscent of those I used to apply to model cars when I was a youngster. They may be something different than that: this is merely my perception.

It makes me wonder if the letters might wear off the keys, given enough use.

But here too it's no biggie for me. I have plenty of old keyboards laying around that plug right in (the PC still uses the same ancient keyboard and mouse ports that have been around for maybe 20 years now. The old IBM PS/2 I think they're called).

Another place of cut corners is the front face plate of the computer. It's definitely got an attractive look. And some might even prefer its unusual eject button for the DVD drive: you press in on one end of a narrow horizontal band beneath the drive; this usage definitely isn't apparent; I just happened to think of trying it, when I was at a loss for anything more obvious. And online in forums I ran across people asking how the hell to open the drive.

Also, pushing the end of this plastic band in to get a DVD tray to retract again is a bit awkward. But maybe you just nudge the tray a bit to make it close (that's true on some other models I've owned). Likewise, the face plate interferes a bit with placing into or removing from the open tray a DVD disk. This makes me a bit anxious because of some previous computers I've worked with which sometimes liked to play games with the disk tray, and unexpectedly retract it on you, before you had either removed a disk or fully placed one there.

Again, this might not be a significant issue for many: I'm just voicing my thoughts and first impressions on the matter.

In the rear, there appears to be a double set of sound ports. I was confused momentarily about where to plug in the speakers, but finally realized I could go by the color coding. The color around the proper hole matched the color of the plug.

And yes, there's a small poster of instructions which accompany the machine. But it is very minimal. Anyone who's a complete computer novice might not get much informational relief there.

As noted by others on various net forums, many of the rear connectors feel less securely fixed into place on the eMachines than other brand boxes. And the physical connections often seem to be more resistant to working together, too. You might wonder if something might bend or break back there, when plugging and unplugging connectors. But I've had no mishap so far.

A possible other cut corner might be one merely of esthetics: namely, whoever designed the Star Trek Borg-like green glowing strip on the face place didn't fully coordinate with the guy designing the speakers. While both the CPU box and speakers are matching black, their lit LED colors are different: one green, the other blue.

The machine is also lighter than I expected. This probably means the case isn't quite as strongly constructed as the brands I've dealt with in the past.

Of course, you mainly need a strong case only if you're going to sit atop it or something. But I did have to do this once with a Mac Performa 6400 I think, as part of the process of dis-assembly. Hopefully nothing like that would be necessary with this machine.

Software, set up, and configuration

Other places where cut corners can readily be found is in the software. Emachines itself offers only a very basic PDF user manual on the disk, which offers virtually nothing about the internal specifications of the machine, and how to expand it. If there's any illustrations in it, those are pretty sparse too.

I checked the PDF when looking for the specs to list in this article.

But Microsoft of course is THE primary software provider for this machine, with their Windows Home 7 Premium. Does Microsoft cut corners here? Most certainly! Indeed, they cut so deeply as to be embarrassing to the company. If I was the boss at Microsoft, I believe I'd fire whatever manager or managers were responsible for some of the snafus.

In Windows 7, Microsoft Works periodically cycles through commercials in one corner of the Works screen while you're typing. Unless you want to pay for a non-ad supported version.

But surely not a single soul will pay for Works in Windows 7. Or even use it at all. After they discover that Microsoft seems to have let Works deteriorate alarmingly in quality.

I used Works quite a bit in my older XP machine, but sometimes lost several minutes of work because it would crash without warning about every 40 minutes or so. And I'm talking crashes brought on by nothing more than typing inside the program: specifically, inside the word processor.

In Windows 7, Works crashed within ten minutes of me starting to use it. Yes: the Windows 7 Works word processor cannot be typed in for more than a few minutes without crashing.

So I gave up on it and downloaded Open Office.

But getting back to my initial experience with the machine...

I only used Internet Explorer long enough to download and install Firefox.

Around that point an eMachines utility prompted me to make a set of recovery disks for the computer, and I'm glad it did. I'd actually meant to do this first thing, and forgot. I'd even bought 10 blank DVD-Rs at the same time I did the PC, to do so. Because in my research beforehand I'd run across people in a forum discussing how DVD-RWs didn't work to burn the recovery disks, but DVD-Rs did.

I ended up having to burn four disks. Three recovery disks, and one for applications and drivers, apparently.

It was at this point I got a fresh cold dose of reality. For I'd hoped that in the whopping twenty years since I'd last bought myself a new computer (I mostly got by on used/refurbs over that time, and only bought new ones for my niece/nephews), that the hardware had finally gotten fast enough to burn disks at a reasonably fast pace. Especially with 6 GB RAM to work with, too! But alas, it hasn't.

Yes, I'm fully aware that DVDs hold lots more information than the CDs they replaced. And that I'm using maybe one of the lowest of low end new PCs. But this is 2010! And it seems like burning a DVD now takes about as long as burning a CD way back in the mid 1990s did. Sheesh! Will progress ever begin?

So that was a disappointment. Having to spend so much time burning DVDs like that. After 20 freaking years.

I guess you can tell I don't burn disks very often. And haven't in at least a couple years before this, I guess. Because they're such a hassle, and so time-consuming. No matter what computer or OS you use. In the past I've burned them on both Macs and Windows PCs.

Once the burning was finally done, I went back online and downloaded an antivirus app: and chose the free version of Avira.

Yeah, Avira pissed me off some months back by one of their glitches contributing to the final death throes of my Windows XP PC. But surely by now they've fixed that nasty little bug, since it caused them a pretty good PR headache online. Or maybe the bug never existed at all in Windows 7. So hopefully I'm covered there.

I also added the noscript plug-in/add-on to Firefox for more protection against malware.

Next up was configuring email.

Uh oh! There was no Outlook Express in Windows 7! In fact, no email client at all! What the hell?!

I googled the problem, and saw that Microsoft had replaced Outlook Express with something called Windows Live. So I downloaded it.

Holy crap. That led to a massive download of junk, of which a mail client was only an itty bitty portion. But it seemed I couldn't pick and choose among the conglomeration. So I took it all. Figured I'd try it. Only after accepting it did it become apparent how huge the download was-- and how long the install would take. Yipes!

I sure did hate doing that to my brand new system...

I finally got that down. Next I uninstalled some nagging Norton antivirus software (part of the bloatware on the eMachines). I used to be a Norton customer a long time ago. But not anymore.

Next I ran into Microsoft's Windows 7 'improvements' of Wordpad, and its Windows GUI in general. It looks like Microsoft got jealous of Mac OS X and decided to try to look more like it. But wow, was that a mistake! Now it's much harder to read the window titles with that weird translucence sometimes obscuring the words. And trying to get rid of all your app menus for no good reason but to be hip or cool, is insane as well. I don't like it myself.

It also appears that Wordpad has lost its undo menu option. The keyboard short cut still seems to work, but newbies may have no way to learn it in the first place now. Grrr.

After witnessing the Windows Live mess, I remembered that Mozilla had a Thunderbird email client, and decided to try that out.

Note that I had concerns here about 32 bit software like Thunderbird and Open Office running in 64 bit Windows 7.

I downloaded Thunderbird, and quit for the night.

The next day I was greeted with a notice of Microsoft updates ready for install, immediately after boot up. Installation took a while. I think I was prompted to reboot. Then after that I got a notice of yet more updates, and had to go through it all again.

There sure is a lot of hurry up and wait involved with Windows 7!

I had to shut down to finish the install.

There's a trial version of Microsoft Word on this PC. And it automatically tries to butt in when you double-click on a Wordpad file you've previously created (as I had). That is, you think you're opening it in WordPad, but instead you're getting shanghaied by Word, and prompted to fill in a registration form of some sort for the demo.

Rats to that! I can't afford to buy Word, and have no intention of getting comfortable in it for a matter of weeks, and then suddenly have to give it up when time comes to pay the corporate fiddler.

But apparently this unwelcome intrusion will continue until I uninstall the Word demo (at least whenever I forget to avoid double-clicking the file to open it, and instead use the pop up menu to choose WordPad manually for opening).

I installed Thunderbird, and found it much tougher to set up for my pop email account than Microsoft's Live app. Thunderbird just plain doesn't like pop email. You literally have to play a little game with the setup screen to even get the option of setting up a pop account. What the heck is wrong with the Thunderbird programmers? Are they trying to keep a tiny marketshare?

In browsing around the menus on the PC, I managed to run across a list of what's likely important serial numbers for my machine if I ever need to get service or support from eMachines. I jotted these down in a notebook. Along with the tech support phone number: 1-866-586-2237.

It was around this point that I began working on transferring my Gigabytes upon Gigabytes of old files from my decrepit Windows XP machine, in a separate room (I have LAN connections for both PCs). I reconnected all the components and cables, and fired it up. Then I dug up the shared folder on the XP, and found it through the network places on Windows 7.

In XP I dragged and dropped a small folder into the shared folder-- and it went poof! Disappeared from the machine completely. As in nowhere to be found afterwards. Lost in limbo. Egads!

I was damn glad I hadn't moved the main folder first! For that first folder was simply vaporized, with no transfer of files accomplished at all! Crap!

I don't know if this was due to me forgetting something about using XP, or just another glitch in my dying XP system, but I sure couldn't afford to lose more folders like that!

I could drag and drop individual files like PDFs successfully, but not folders.

Damn! I had hundreds of thousands of files in the remaining folders: I couldn't drag and drop every file one at a time!

So I decided to try burning them to CD for feeding to the Win 7 machine instead. But I'd screwed up my CD burning in XP when I downloaded utilities to burn an Ubuntu CD maybe two months before. The Ubuntu web site had insisted you had to have their special utilities or it wouldn't work. Well, turns out it ruins the normal CD burning capacities of a Windows XP drive too. With no easy or quick way to fix it. Damn! I tried uninstalling the Ubuntu utilities, but XP couldn't find any uninstall provision in them (an awful lot of stuff related to Ubuntu these days seems only half-baked).

Holy crap! How was I going to get my files off this machine?

Then I remembered something about Windows XP: copying and pasting folders. It turned out that would work without vaporizing the originals. Or at least most of the time the folders would successfully transfer.

So I spent the next several hours copying my files over from the XP PC to the Win 7 machine, via the LAN.

After I got the files copied over, I started looking to turn on file indexing for Windows search. This is something I've wanted (indexed search capability) for years now, but never had computer hardware sufficiently powerful to deal with my Gigabytes without getting too bogged down.

I hoped like hell I finally had such a beast now.

I was surprised to learn Win 7 automatically indexes everything in spots like the Documents folder-- which was where I'd put everything. Yay!

Over the next few days I could hear the PC's hard drive chugging at the indexing. That effort seems to have only the very slightest effect on the machine's performance. The biggest one I noticed was during the massive file transfer itself. For the file copying slowed a bit while the indexing was going on simultaneously. The indexing might have added just the smallest of hesitations to certain web browsing actions too. But we're talking differences most likely wouldn't even notice.

If I can get a terrific working indexed search for my 8 GB or so/17 years worth of accumulated internet research files for no more cost than this tiny performance hit, I'll be very satisfied on this point!

However...

I was surprised to learn that I have to restart my Win 7 PC more often than I did my XP, for relatively small changes to the interface, like having the text be adjusted one size bigger. Seriously. Had to reboot for that.

But as Win 7 boots up and shuts down lots faster than XP, I guess that's all right. So far anyway.

Note that Microsoft has also changed some of the interface mechanisms for safely unmounting USB devices in Windows 7. Or at least I was confused by their new set up, and unmounted an external hard drive when I only wanted to disconnect a camera's USB cable (damn it). Again, I don't think OS changes which add to user problems and confusion and lower productivity are improvements.

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