My grandparents had one of these when I was growing up, and my grandmother was diligent enough to actually go through and do all of the rebates specifically so she could claim to her friends that her computer was "Free". She had been paying for the upgrade paths and dial-up internet that was required to get the full rebate for YEARS and she actually had the unit replaced under their "Never obsolete" plan a few times. She only stopped using the computer in 2010 or so when she discovered video chat through Skype and wasn't able to get it to work on her ancient e-machines computer.
@@clouds-rb9xt “hate the poor” because they can’t imagine using an out of date machine? The person in the story was not poor. You are a very sad depressed person wrapped in leftist ideology and i wish when I was in your position someone had pointed out how disgusting and dumb I sounded. Get help.
I used to work at Best Buy back in the day these things were sold. The amount of pressure to 'attach' selling MSN Dial-up so the customer could 'save $400 instantly' was utterly insane. As a technician...selling these to people with the 'never obsolete' line really rubbed me the wrong way and I refused to use it as a selling tactic. Eventually the company figured out it would be better to keep technicians behind the tech bench and out of the way of the sales people.
Same. I wound up quitting once they started that pressure. There was a lot of sales I just found difficult as it was in a moral grey zone. This "deal" was so glaringly dishonest I wanted nothing to do with it.
This was my first PC. Now I see how my dirt poor parents afforded it lol. That PC was the single-most important thing to me growing up, and shaped me into who I am today. Thanks for the nostalgia and happy tears, Clint.
same here!!! I will always remember the anger I had when games like Planetside 1 would run at sub 5 FPS and become unplayable, but the emachine also generated some really great memories
Same here, haha. Dad bought me the computer and Abe's Odyssee back in 1997. I remember sniffing the computer right out of the box; that silicone-like smell of the circuit board lives with me to this day. Sometimes I'll smell something similarly plasticky and get flashbacks to the Radio Shack and the woman who sold it to us in the 90s. I remember the day vividly even though I was like 4 1/2 years old at the time. It feels almost like a time machine because I can see the clothes the woman is wearing and it's nothing like how women are dressed today. Skirt + a suit with that weird rough fabric similar to old couches.
Yup, the salvation of many a dirt poor kid including me. I work in IT now, and a good portion of my foundations came from keeping this exact PoS running through high school and college. I taught myself how to apply for scholarships and financial aid with it and many a late night Starcraft LAN party. Oh the horror of finding drivers for the LAN card I had to buy from Wal Mart to use university internet.
@@phattjohnson My comment was mainly referring to how a lot of products are going towards a subscription model now. Like the iPhone every year thing or Volvo's car subscription service that they were talking about
In 2000, I bought a $550 Emachine for the restaurant I was managing. Made all the financial reports, food cost, inventory, and ordering a breeze. I took it with me 2 years later and eventually gave to my mom. She used it until 2007 when she bought her own newer "Core-2-duo" haha. My sister's used the Emachine until 2010. It was awesome for the price and I certainly got my money's worth.
Similar story 2000 was my first pc. Honestly that was a luxury I now feel. We pulled it until 2006 as it was a great pentium 4 with 20 gb hard drive windows 98. 64MB ram and a huge 17 inch monitor from LG. It was a great Brio series by HP. Later I started buying cheapest computers 2010- 2018 AMD athlon that I got for 150 USD and later intel pentium G5460 which I am using now. Dad is using the old amd. I am exchanging this with with dad again. I will get another pc soon. PCs in my opinion last really long. But the market makes us feel that new ones are many times faster than what you have. For my job any small pc would work fine
This comment let me remember the times when we could buy something and not expect it to be artificially slowed down or have some built-in MI-style self-destruct thing in it triggered after 2 years.
I still use my Dell inspiron core 2 duo laptop. Of course I have a more updated récent one, but for drawing pcb with an old version of eagle and ripping CD it's good enough. I also like that it have a dvd rom in it, so I don't need an external drive because I still use physical media.
@@TheMadAfrican1 they built it cheap because they did things like sucky tech support and they owned a company that made parts for it like the power supply that really sucked
I had a friend in high school who’s grandparents owned one of these and took the “never obsolete” promise very seriously. My friend tried getting them to upgrade to something newer but they always refused, citing the sticker meant it was “still a good computer”. They used it for emails and web browsing until it finally gave out in 2019 and they eventually got an iPad to replace it.
OMG my dad's computer had this exact same monitor back in the 90s!!! I remember that a friend made me a copy of Unreal Tournament, and I used to sneek out to the computer room to play when my parents were sleeping, because my mum will freak out if she saw me playing "violent" games... I'ts incredible how much we enjoyed these old machines back in the days...
FYI - The dedicated buttons at the top (7:55) were actually tied to the specific crappy "walled garden" software provided by the company to which you were forced to subscribe if you wanted the big rebate. For example, an AOL-sponsored PC was pre-loaded with the AOL "operating system" which was essentially a desktop app that included all those features, including the AOL "browser" which only allowed you to see a tiny portion of the actual web. The banking and other buttons were tied to AOL-specific services and apps.
If I asked this via comment, it may not get read, but you seem to know a thing or two. Are eMachine and Gateway related? I can't say I've seen either since the days of when my dad had a few IBMs.
While it was true that earlier versions of AOL only had their "landing page" and newsgroups, by the time 3.0 came out, they had a normal web browser that could browse the wider internet. You could also use other browsers like Netscape or IE once you dialed up to the AOL service. I actually liked AOLs newsgroup layout, it made things A LOT easier to find in the days before mass search engines made finding content easy. And since there were fewer people online back then, and content was more curated, it wasn't full of crap like the modern web is. I used to love downloading all matters of games for my PCs and Macs back in the day from AOL newsgroups. At some point, AOL made it so you could directly dial their number, like any other ISP and you didn't need their software at all. I used them well into the mid 2000s, they were a godsend in rural areas. You could almost always find an AOL dialup number to connect to in the days before mass wifi became a thing.
@@hblackburn5580 Yes, they are related. Gateway was founded in 1987, and eMachines in 1998. Gateway bought eMachines in 2004 and Acer bought Gateway in 2007. Acer retired the eMachines brand in 2013 because it was unprofitable and became known for poor quality. The Gateway brand is still around, but it's nowhere near as big as it once was. Their machines now are just bottom of the barrel disposable garbage made by Acer.
@@GGigabiteM Thanks so much! That actually answered more than expected. I always remembered liking Gateway's cow theme, but eMachines I remember being the standard classroom computer, and it makes sense because those things were just bricks of plastic IMO. I am using an Acer monitor, and it's pretty decent quality, as was the Acer PC I had in college during the Windows 7 days. I remember wondering where Acer came from, as it was the first PC I bought on my own, and I hadn't seen that brand before. It, and my Lenovo I bought in '17, took a lot of saving for as a broke student. IDK too much beyond the basics of PCs, but that's why I like channels like this!
I got this as a hand-me-down from my dad in about 2003. I moved with my mom for the summer for a summer job and when I came back to my room and started the computer up, I heard a loud boom and sparks shot out of the PSU. Quality. I still absolutely love those cheesy orignal eMachine stickers. Ended up buying and modding another eMachine tower after this swapping a P4 for a 6600 C2D and it was awesome. eMachines really stepped up their quality of units after this and their CRT monitors too though.
My first pc was an eMachines. I remember my parents trying to sort out that pesky rebate. I remember finding it a decade later, wet from the storage unit; it started right up after some cleaning.
That rebate was a pain, considering it was cheap at the time.. Died out on me year later, nice little amd athlon machine. Glad I learned to put them together, which made my life easier to deal with them.
I worked for Best Buy from 1997-2000. It looked totally different then than it does now. Every weekend people would be packed in there like sardines. Walls and walls of CRT televisions and tower PC's, the video game section dripping with PS1 and N64 games, rows upon rows of CDs and VHS cassettes, old school Nokia dumbphones everywhere...I could go on. I remember the day we got our very first HDTV and DVD player to put on display. I helped unbox it and set it up. Good times, and it'll never be like that again. You go to a brick and mortar any day of the week and they're dead.
This was actually my first own pc I was given as a kid. I remember that keyboard and asking my dad what the heck the green buttons on top did, only to get a nice satisfying response of "just don't touch those..."
It refers to the $99 upgrade program mentioned on the sticker. In theory, if you signed up for the program, every 24 months you could return your PC (with original packaging and proof of purchase) to be upgraded to the specs of a PC that was currently available for the original purchase price. Of course, they only mention processor speed, so I doubt you'd have gotten more memory or disk space, even if those specs had changed. No doubt it was one of those deals they expected very few customers to complete, even once, so how many upgrades they actually honored is anyone's guess. Here's the fine print: "Special eMachines™ Upgrade for $99 to eMachines™Network Members Only Subscribe to the eMachines™ Network for 24 consecutive months and we’ll upgrade your eMachines™ for only $99 (plus shipping)! Here’s how it works: If you live in the contiguous U.S. or Canada, we’ll contact you after you’ve subscribed to The eMachines™ Network for 24 months and offer to upgrade your eMachines™ PC to whatever processor technology is built into whatever eMachines™ PC you can buy at the time of the upgrade for whatever you paid for your original machine. For example, let’s say your eTower* PC was priced at $399 (not including promotional discount) and runs a 366 MHz processor, but at the time of the upgrade $399 would buy an 800MHz eTower. We’ll upgrade your eTower* to 800MHz. All you have to do is ship us your PC within 90 days, plus $99 (or Canadian equivalent), proof of purchase and payment for return shipping. We’ll promptly upgrade it and return it. Note: you’ll have to back-up your data to avoid accidental loss, and use the original packaging (we have replacement packaging available). See more detailed information"
@@cyberman7348 SSDs were the real game changer in that regard. It breathed new life into my laptop at the time, and when my (modern) system SSD died a couple of years ago, I had to install a system HDD while I RMA'ed the broken drive. I couldn't believe how slow the computer was -- I was convinced something was completely broken with the Windows configuration but in the end had to put it down to running Windows on an HDD.
@@cyberman7348 i7 3770 serves good. 16gb ram, can still add more. ssd's not even entirely necessary but deffo helps. video can be upgraded as time goes, 1060 6gb does well today. still on 1080p lcd
Man what a throwback. I used to sell these at Bestbuy. They were so popular especially for older folks wanting their first PC. The store got tracked on how many dial up internet deals we included, along with service plans and other accessories. Was the wild west of PC days because it was all so new.
@@jackroutledge352 I think I have about 100 originals in my loft. It seemed a shame to bin them but back then every single computer magazine you bought had one taped to the front.
I played countless hours of The Sims on this bad boy haha. Eventually, this became my computer once my parents upgraded and I literally disassembled it, upgraded the ram, and added a CDRW drive to it. This computer taught me how to work on computers and gave me the courage to build my own.
This reminds me of when my granny used to get all the “free with rebate” products from stores back in the 90s and 00s. She had a house full of stuff she got for free, like red hair dye that she would never use and 3 years worth of toilet paper. That was her “retirement plan”. She planned to sell all that stuff at flea markets if her bank account ran out or got too low before she passed away. Sadly, it just became a bunch of expired or moldy junk my dad had to throw away when she passed away. I tried to buy some of that red hair dye from her one day and she wouldn’t part with it even for me. Offered her near full price and she still wanted to keep it “just in case”.
She was definitely a hoarder. She grew up poor and then divorced with no work history, so I think it triggered some kind of serious anxiety in her that set it off. She always kept a spotless house before their divorce. I did see hoarding tendencies before the divorce, but she kept all her antiques and collectibles neatly organized and put into storage. She had one storage building for things like overflow from her collecting and lawn furniture and so forth, and some closets and drawers with things stored in them, but she never bought more than she had room for until the divorce. It was truly sad, but at least it gave her some comfort.
Wow, your granny was prophetic - there was a severe toilet paper shortage crises during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Did she live long enough to live through Covid?
I used to "sell" these at Staples, usually as part of an MSNOnline bundle. About 5 of every 6 came back broken within a week or two. Usually due to dodgy power supplies. And when I later found out these things were being built in someone's garage often using second-hand parts, it was no surprise.
After a week or two?! Wow! Unbelievable. We had one at an office I worked in, such an incredible turkey of a computer. I was happy to be using a Mac G4, a total Cadillac of a computer
@@trashyraccoon2615 - They were notorious for having bad power supplies and eventually a scandal was uncovered where they were found to be using second-hand parts pulled from other machines. That's what led to their bankruptcy and sale to Gateway, which wasn't much of an improvement.
The power supply in ours lasted for several years, but then stopped working shortly after a lightning storm. After I replaced the power supply though the thing kept going forever.
@FlyingMonkies325 That's so not true. I don't know who you're buying from, but I've owned nothing but pre-built computers, and they never went bad on me and I never had issue with the parts. My Alienware PC has lasted for much longer than it should have. If this were a common thing, it would reflect in the reviews for these machines. This stuff is pretty rare. Yes, there are some scam companies out there, but most of the big ones we know these days are pretty reliable. It would be pretty hard to get away with something like this these days. People would be talking about it on trust sites etc.
One of my first "jobs" was selling systems very similar to these for my dad at age 10, they were so cheap at the time and the internet was only just becoming widely available, so we managed to sell one to almost every household in our small town. It was the first computer I owned too. Some of the houses and businesses that I sold them to still have them to this day, about 20 years later.
It's very nice they still have them. The plastic on the monitor, pressing the buttons, all that has been etched in my childhood neurons in ways that nothing at this age can get etched. I was just thinking why don't we use big beige PCs at school? Why does every student have a laptop and tablet they use to watch tiktok videos on when I'm teaching math? I want more beige computers.
We had eMachine eTower growing up. It came with a Pentium 3 500 MHz, a Voodoo 3, 128 MB of RAM, and a DVD-ROM drive. It was an awesome PC, I remember loving gaming on it. It lasted a long time too, the only thing I ever had to replace in it was the power supply. It's still kicking around in storage at my dads house.
Sold so many of these when I worked at Best Buy. The “Free” computer deals were crazy. Management was stoke and I’m like 16 and asking how much does the subscription to MSN cost? It was funny because it was when adults realized they could find porn online and all the awkward “so I heard you could find anything on the internet?”
Haha, I “sold” these at Best Buy as my first real job. Sold is in quotes because I was terrible at my job. I can still remember my manager pushing us to sell “Performance Service Plans” and ink along with every printer sold.
We would buy those plans if I ever thought the company wanted to honor a plan. I always figured its just some ripoff so if something happens there's like a denial-all-service-claims Section U in some big hidden book somewhere and you aren't covered.
I remember working at Best Buy for a short time back in 2008. I was a Geek Squad "agent" lol. Also, I remember them pushing me to sell services that customers didn't need. This old lady brought in a computer that just had a loose connector and they made me charge her $175 for an advanced diagnostic and repair. I felt bad. They would yell at us to sell those service plans. Like, literally yell.
@@kebas239 i'm not sure they're quite like that anymore, i got a prebuilt (i know, hilarious, i cant build a pc, shove it up ya) and i had problems for a while because the power supply was defective and the fans were super weak, the guy i talked to at the next-closest best buy to me actually had us buy some case fans off of amazon that _he_ personally recommended. he was cool as hell, even told me that the radiator i had was complete garbage (120mm/1 fan, yikes). i can tell he didnt do it out of "manager told him to" and was trying to help.
Holy crap! I bought an eMachine back in 1999. It was my first "good" computer lol. It was a great little computer though! I taught myself HTML and web design on that thing, and got into a little bit of photo editing too. I worked it hard, and it held up quite well. I ended up retiring it 4 years later when I decided to build my own PC and upgrade my computing experience quite a bit! I still have fond memories of computing on my eMachine though. Good times!
My dad bought a similar EMachine around 2000 (probably at Walmart), and it was actually pretty decent. I'll never forget the stickers on the front, just like this one, lol. I remember the flip down door on the front for port access, very clever. That power button click really brings back memories. I think he got around seven or eight years out of it, before switching to a laptop.
@@Gr8thxAlot mine came with a 4.3 GB hard drive and I remember telling my mom that I'll never use/need more than that lol. Oh how ignorant I was about future tech!
Mine was a Packard bell in the fall of 1998. With a whopping fast state of the art 200mhz processor and 16 mb of ram. Still cost over 1000$ and it was obsolete in a year because processor speeds doubled just a few months later and cost the same price. And by the end of 1999 the 800mhz chips were out and while my mobo did support up to 400mhz and 64mb of ram. After fully maxing it out it was still half as powerful as what was on the market for less than what I paid for it. Luckily my upgrades were stuff a friend gave me when he upgraded. So I didn't have to pay for it. I think I did buy an 80$ memory stick.
Clint, I almost bought this exact system at VCF 😄 Glad that someone else who can appreciate it was able to pick it up. I really wanted to meet you while I was there but the timing didn't work out. Just wanted to say thanks for the years of awesome content, you are the best!
This was my first computer. Not at all the only computer we had, but it was the first one I called my own, the first unit I ever worked on and upgraded (for The Sims 2!) I loved her, I still do :) Edit: I don't know if you'll have the same issue I did, but the recovery media doesn't load the sound driver properly, and needs to be installed afterwards.
I believe they made the same model with the two different sound chips and the recovery disc only had the AC 97 driver. If I remember right. I used to sell these at Circuit City and remember it being an issue
There was a period of several years around this era where every time I did a clean install of Windows, the sound driver never loaded - didn’t matter what brand of PC it was.
Can confirm, I had one of these, it was a model from a couple years later, and the optical drive does have a rounded front to match the bezel of the machine. It was my first computer so I had a lot of affection for it even though it was pretty terrible tbh. I got a lot of milage out of The Sims, though, and even managed to play and beat Morrowind on lowest settings. Got to walk around in a fog and stare at the ground so it wouldn't take so long to load each area.
I literally just bought and restored an eTower 766id with original stickers (and Windows ME...), so this is well timed! As suggested, the 566ir was my family's first "modern" computer so the nostalgia for these models is strong.
This channel made me dig out the old Inspiron laptop I had that an old IT client gave me when they were cleaning out their storage. Works great too, P3 1.1Ghz, maxed out SDRAM to 512MB, tossed in an 80GB 7200RPM drive & snagged an old 1280x1024 LCD for nostalgia's sake. Love firing it up & playing all my old 20+ year old games in all their original retro glory 😁
I got a mid 2000s version. Probably around '04 or '05. My parents got it for me when I was going into middle school and it was becoming much more common to have to do online research and typing up papers for school. I remember my dad, even back then, was really into the parental controls stuff and had website blockers as well as an automatic shutdown software on it that would turn the system off at 9pm. So many stressful nights of trying to wrap up conversations with my friends on MSN Messenger and AIM before I'd get booted off lol. But then I also got my uncle's hand me down graphics cards to put into my system to help me run better games (I mostly just remember Anno 1404 and Battle for Middle Earth 1 & 2). But yeah, I had that machine until just like a few months ago. Hadn't used it since like 2010 when I got my first laptop for college, but I booted it up after sitting in the closet for over 10 years and it felt like looking at a yearbook/diary. I used to save my MSN and AIM chat logs into Word Docs so I got to read some pretty cringy stuff lol. And I also used to be somewhat into photography and had a cheap digital camera in high school and so I had a bunch of photos from those years that I had never gotten around to putting on my Facebook.
@Baxi I played Heroes! :) I just remember when I first played WoW I would completely lose track of time and when I finally thought of checking it was time to get ready to drive a school bus. I went into parental controls and had it kick me out at bedtime, but it didn't give me any warning. There I was, fighting monsters, and then suddenly I was kicked out. Wait, what?! How is it already bedtime?! I usually logged in the next day and needed to run back to my corpse.
You're so lucky that you saved your chat logs like that! I'd kill to see what all I wrote on aim and Myspace back in those days. I very genuinely still miss Myspace and wish it made a full on comeback to take Facebook down a few pegs.
Yeah I had friends who had parents like that. I wish my parents had been that careful with me. I got into some stuff that I definitely shouldn't have been doing, and people I certainly shouldn't have talked to.
My funniest memory of emachines was when I worked at office depot, selling these things (by the truck load!) some models had the Cyrix CPU chip in them.... Those things were the WORST! We had to literally disable the screensaver because if it ever tried running it, the system would bluescreen..... Freaking hilarious! Made it easy to upsell to a better model or brand!!
I’ve been thinking about doing this with an original Xbox case lol. I happened to find an OG Xbox in the dumpster at my apartment, so I took it with the intent to repair it. Seems to just have a dead hard drive, so I might just gut it and save the internals for later and build a gaming PC in the case. At the same time, the OG Xbox is a year or two away from being considered “antique” and considering it’s massive impact on gaming, a refurbished OG Xbox might be worth a lot of money
I completely agree with you on trying to preserve these PCs... they are our history. And honestly they can be quite fun today. I'd recommend a Voodoo 3 PCI in that if you have one. I have a 566i and it is a ton of fun.
Oh man, I'd love nothing more than to build a 2000s era PC with a Voodoo 2 and an Intel Pentium 4 lol and Windows XP. That would be pretty awesome. To me, the very early 2000s was the pinnacle of PC gaming. The gaming industry was just starting to fully embrace 3D gaming, the games that were coming out around then were full of heart, soul, and passion, and the market itself was very vibrant and alive. Compared to today where all we get are six different versions of Call of Duty or the re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-release of Skyrim: Smartfridge Edition. Why yes, I am wearing a pair of rose tinted glasses, STFU lol.
Low-end PCs were sure getting dirt-cheap by the late '90. In 1999 my dad bought a bottom-of-the-line Compaq Presario with a Cyrix MII 366 processor, 64 MB of RAM, 4.3 GB hard drive, and 32X CD-ROM for around $300 (not including monitor).
if you worked in retail sales at the time in the late 90s, it was crazy how fast many things were moving in certain segments. home DVD alone dropped so fast in price to become attainable to regular consumers even before ps2, and the bottom of prices started falling out of vcrs. lots of 2 head mono junk started coming out again.
Big reason a bunch of mom and pop PC shops went out of business. I know my pc business couldn't compete with the bigger pc builders in price around this time. But I did repair a bunch of these. I remember replacing a bunch of power supplies.
Wow. I'm not just imagining things. It was indeed *cheaper* to get machines capable of gaming in the early 2000's than it is today. Today seems to be the next 1992, with all the absurd prices for hardware.
I worked at best buy in this time period. It was wild, because eventually it got out in the media that people could break the contract and keep the $400 rebate. The day after that story broke on TV, there was a line around the block.
Sucks that there are two replies to your comment but because of the way the fascists at YT created the algorithm, I can see neither of them. Phuk Yootube!
@@jacquestube it most likely never got published for real. if it contains words or sentences that YT considers BAD then it will only be shown to you and nobody else
I know my grandma never got involved in the whole rebate craziness, but we did have an e-Machine and I seriously loved it. It outlasted lots of towers we have had, and Windows XP....it was just glorious. :)
He might already have a lot of those others, but yeah I honestly find a lot of those 2000s computers kinda boring. Technically impressive in a lot of ways for their day but kinda "intangible", and all them very alike from brand to brand and none of them doing anything particularly different from another. Where the 80s stuff you have all kinds of varieties of graphical and audio capabilities and signature looks and sounds to each one, where these are all just framebuffers and streaming PCM audio. Obviously superior but just not very interesting or much different than we have today. Would be neat if he did some eastern blok computers. I've recently found some youtubers who've been doing a bunch of those and it's neat to see what's similar and what's different.
I have a 466id still with labels like this one. Bought it new back in the day. Still have the keyboard. Still operates as new. Keep up the good work. Brings back memories from a good time.
If I remember right, the issue with onboard soundcards not being able to run as soundblaster cards was because the IRQ was not set correctly. Usually a quick fix in the bios to restore sound blaster functionality.
That was only one piece in a large complex puzzle. Many of those cheap integrated sound chips had terrible drivers and terrible MPU-401 emulation. You also needed a VxD driver to expose the raw ports and IRQ to DOS programs running in Windows, which many of those sound chips didn't have. Microsoft at the time was trying to push hardware vendors to only provide WDM drivers to divest themselves of legacy DOS software, and many cheap integrated sound chips only had WDM drivers. This meant no sound in DOS games at all, even if you rebooted in pure DOS mode.
Lol late to this but I have the same model I picked up a few years ago. Sadly I think the irq/bios thing extends to more than soundblasters. I tried installed a different video card for funsies and...well nothing worked, even a generic 98se install the card never worked right. There's no way to disable on board video in my bios...kept conflicting.
There was an early VOIP company around that time that gave a free Gateway and free phone service through their company, presumably for being a guinea pig for the service. My grandparents got their first computer that way. I can't remember the exact details but it was a solid midrange system.
I was working at a Staples when eMachines first started coming out. All the tech center people were intrigued and excited by these new affordable computers. That didn't last. They were buggy as hell, didn't work well, and we had to constantly repair brand new machines people bought just a day or two before. (Our store managers basically had the attitude that if you bought it here, we should do anything we could to keep you happy. Heck, most of our repair work was just us honoring the BS extended warranties when the warranty company wouldn't.) One day, one of our customers brought his machine back because something wasn't working right. (Don't remember exactly what. It was a LONG time ago.) He'd tried to contact eMachines customer support, but they just kept giving him the run-around. The assistant manager finally gets hold of somebody (after well over an hour) at eMachines, who insists he needs to have the customer call them. He tries to explain that the customer did call, but could not get through. The rep kept insisting, refusing to help the manager to help the customer. Suddenly, the manager got a look of shock, and just mumbled, "he hung up on me..." The manager sent multiple emails about the incident to the district supervisor, and about three or five levels further than that. Basically, everybody above him whose email address he had. The next day, we were told to pull ALL eMachines. The manager ended up basically getting them pulled from every store for several years. (Though they later started carrying them again, but long after I left the company.) Those things were utter garbage.
In the mid 90s, I trash-picked a IBM 8088 with a 10MB hard drive. I think a C64 was more capable. Actually my family's first computer was an Apple IIe with a monochrome monitor. Things have come really far since then!
I still have this machine, with all the stickers and it still works. Original Hardrive died about 3 years ago though. Original Floppy drive died quite sometime ago, around 2012. Still have all the documentation, mouse, original installation disc/floppies and the box. I don’t know why, but I miss the hum from older PCs like this. Happy to see you found one working. Also, because the emachine pc was registered, years later I received a mail from Gateway, that due to a lawsuit, they were required to either give $ or equipment equivalent to $500 I believe. I ended up choosing a PC and Monitor from the options Gateway presented.
Manufacturers still use them for peripherals like GPUs. They're typically used to push the price from "one of the cheapest" to "the cheapest" knowing that few people go through the hassle of cashing in on the offer. I've even gone as far as getting a rebate card (after weeks of waiting) and then forgetting to use it before the expiry date. Unless you're really strapped for cash, they're not worth the effort, so I tend to ignore them.
And the inevitable class action lawsuits, with the manufacturers correctly figuring after they pay off the plaintiffs and/or state attorney general with a settlement, they'll still be ahead based on those people who never sued or didn't care if they got the rebate.
NIIIICE! I had this exact PC around 2001/2002. I upgraded mine with an nVidia MX-440, mainly so I could have composite out and play DN3D and Need For Speed III on my 27" TV. Good times.
@Potatoh 1GB of ram isn't even enough for Vista so no this won't run it. The motherboard on that thing is too limited. XP would most likely run decently on it.
I worked at Staples around that time. emachines were known as boomerangs because we knew they would be coming back to the store soon. It was so bad we told shoppers they were junk and sold them anything else.
That's weird, I had the model that came out right after this one and never had a single problem with it. I used it every single day, countless hours of burning cds, downloading from Napster and various other things and never had a single problem with it. Hell, it even had Windows Millennium and it still ran pretty damn considering its lack luster specs.
My first computer was an old Vectra that one of my mom's clients handed down to me. It ended up dying shortly after. Addicted to computers at this point, I begged my mom and sister for months after to get me one of these. I remember they had it for $50 after all those crazy rebates that Best Buy attached with that MSN dial-up bundle. Took like 3 hours to get it but I was literally glued to it for the next few years. Insane how it basically defined my life.
I think I had the 566i. Yours is definitely faster than what II remember. We had the stock 64MB of ram and it was basically unusable after about a year. We eventually got an upgrade to 128 and became much more useable. When I learned about emulation, I bought a couple of cheap gamepads from walmart. Just about all we ever did was play snes and genesis games on it. Good times.
Not on K6s, though. As an AMD fanboy for most of the time, I have to admit, UT runs like crap on every K6 to K6-3+. But those Mendocino Celerons like in the video were really great, at least on par with a PII with the same clockspeed, if not faster.
@@plaguis1391 Framerate drops if there's lots of action onscreen, the FPU simply can't keep up. Maybe a well optimized machine performs better, but the issue persists.
Whaoooo slow your role there buddy. Alot of us had to play in Software rendering mode because at that time having a GPU (called a 3d accelerator at the time) was rare.
I dont know why, but I love all this 90s ewaste. Just makes me so happy to see all these old games up and running on the original hardware. I sooo wish I still had my old IBM. They are as rare as hens teeth where I live.
In Canada back around this time (early 2000s) the gov decided that a computer was a necessary tool that everyone should have access to. If you had a low enough income (can't recall the threshold) you could get one of these (or similar) for free. I know a bunch of students who got them since they were adults, but had a super low reported income.
Great video! I grew up in a smaller poorer farm town, and the nearest retail store was a Walmart that was about 45 minutes away, so eMachines were pretty much all we had in the late 90's, early 2000's. I remember getting my first one, because at a friend's house I saw a video of Battlefield 2 being played on G4TV when they showcased PC games (what a time to be alive); however, the onboard video card was nowhere near powerful enough to run it, so my parents drove me about 2 hours away to a Staples where I purchased an ATI AGP video card which would suffice (though probably being at least double the cost of what it would have been on Tigerdirect or Newegg at the time); unfortunately, when it was installed I realized I needed an internet connection, which we didn't have. Sad.
Wow, now this is a blast from the past. I remember having one of these in the late 90s and maybe even lasting into the very early 2000s. I remember in, something like 1998, emulating Chrono Trigger on this thing and beating it for the first (of many) times.
Those stickers eMachines slapped on their towers were definitely eye-catching, no doubt. I remember seeing eMachines systems in Circuit City, Best Buy, Office Depot, Staple's, etc. I opted for an HP mini tower system w/466 mhz Celeron, in 1999.
I had one of these emachine models I bought in 1999 or 2000. I also sold electronics and sold a ton of them. The good thing about these emachines was they were so cheap by the time it felt like you needed to upgrade it actually was cheaper to replace everything inside than buy a new tower. I remember over time literally replacing everything except the case and floppy drive. The good thing about the case was it had a lot of room to add additional hardware so you could get a lot of life out of a low end purchase.
The single most nostalgic thing in this video? Having to jiggle the monitor power button cause it gets stuck. That was a shockingly good bit of nostalgia for me.
Loved my 366i2. I learned a lot of the inner workings of Win98 on it. The speakers were the first to go of course. Then I added RAM, a 4x CD-RW, a WinTV tuner, an Ethernet card and I think also a USB card if memory serves. Had it from 1998 to 2003. It ran 24/7 for those final two years when I used it as a personal file host.
it's in the Windows 98 era that I started building my tower computers instead of buying brand computers, so to me the golden age aspect was the proliferation of the build-your-own-PC at this time. Loved going to the stores that had shelves and shevels of all the parts
The unreal engine was phenomenal at that time. Impressive graphics in proportion the machines that could run it and still have tons of fun. I remember those days. Absolutely a milestone in gaming imho.
Ahh yes, the gold ol' days, haha. I remember being blown away when Unreal came out. It was fun seeing Unreal Tournament as well -- reminds me of my college days when I played that in team competition in an intercollegiate gaming league against other universities.
It's a shame that Unreal engine is now the most unoptimized engine out there, stuttering all the time and requiring you to have a state of the art computer to run a game with barely good graphics.
I had this EXACT computer. It was my dad’s upgrade from a Compaq Presario, and both eventually ended up being passed down to me and my siblings when my dad got something nicer 😂. I remember going to the Circuit City on e86th street in manhattan with him to buy these computers, and the massive amounts of paperwork he had to do. I remember alternating between AOL & Compuserve a couple times, likely because he signed up for one of these deals lol. I ran that eMachines tower until probably 2006. It performed pretty well with some ram and hdd upgrades. I miss the early 2000s. Thanks for this!
An old friend of mine had one of these for his first year of uni and we got a lot of fun out of complaining about how 'not great' it was at the time. I'm gonna send him video this to reminisce about those days
I had an Emachine when I was a kid and I learned how to gut it and put better parts in from other broken computers. That green button brought back memories!
12:32 I remember our PC had everything midi an octave higher too! For some reason it was only on Windows 98 though, not when we had 95, and it was mono too, but was stereo in 95. IIRC we had a Genius brand soundcard. Soundmaker 32x i think it was.
I was an IT tech for a small architectural firm in '99-'01 ish. This is super nostalgic for me. And I remember wondering if it was worth upgrading the entire office from NT 4.0 to 2000, then again to XP shortly after that. What a wild west sort of time the market was, especially as a hobbyist.
Migrating from Win 2k to XP was only needed once Wink2k was EOL a couple years prior to XP EOL I would still be using my Win2K pro install if it was not EOL by a decade+.
@@JETWTF It needed to be upgraded sooner because certain upgraded applications required it. Why did we upgrade like that? Because the boss said to do it, LOL.
Aww man, I miss Windows NT 4.0. It was when MS Windows was made primarily for business, and professionals. And had a no-nonsense no frills attitude. It was too old to work with my dedicated retro programming machine, so I'm using 2Kpro (disconnected from the internet as a stand alone of course) However, I should consider upgrading the server soon. I'm still stuck on Server 2008!
the explosion of cheap, easy to replace pc's back then was nuts, I remember home insurance and other deals where they would chuck in pc's as a signing bonus, my granny got a brand new emachines with her policy, with free net for 12 months, once that ended, she signed up for 2 years at £19.99, and got another pc.
That, and gaming was more readily available. You didn't need to build your own NASA server to play video games on your PC, my buddy had an old Dell computer from 2001 that we were able to play WoW on with no problems. Now? You have to have a frikkin' battleship class PC just to run CoD. I miss being able to hang on to a Dell home computer for like 10 years, and still be able to play everything. I just built my gaming PC like 4-5 years ago and I'm already looking into replacing parts because some of my games are getting laggy.
@Tommy Madison We can also try not to be such graphics whores. My $1200 MSI GL75 with an RTX2070 doesn't have much trouble playing most modern games at 1080p at 60fps. .....well, there's still Microsoft Flight Simulator and DCS and me being an avgeek, tho
@@Rickety How much did it cost in 2000? I forgot. Now you can run any game you want at high, sometimes ultra,1080p 60fps for $500 to $600; for the complete computer.
LGR thank you so much for taking the time to make these videos. I don't have the energy nor the expertise and I'm glad you've found a way to monetize on the nostalgia!!! ❤️
I love these eMachines because they're so easy to find out and about. They make for useful backup 98 machines for when you're swapping out components on your main DOS machine, but still want to use your disks and floppies instead of DOSBox to play your games.
Working in a independent computer store in the early 2000's I hated working on these. We had a lot come in for upgrades as well, installing cheap AOpen AW-840 and TNT2 video cards so they were somewhat usable.
Hey Clint! Great video as always! I remember growing up my neighbor had an emachines laptop and we'd play Minecraft together sometimes using it. Another emachines related memory was when I was getting into computers and just wanted any computer that I could get my hands on I got quite a few emachines XP machines along the way. Also thanks so much for signing my model M and hope you enjoy the Reuters keyboard!
In the early 2000's I worked at Staples. We had a 90% failure rate on the Emachines pc's. One lady wanted one so bad we literally made 1 good machine out of 3. It was ridiculous. I was so happy when I was able to quit working there.
Sounds like a store I worked in, in the mid/late 90s. All the parts were white label things. No company. No tech support. And you had to guess at some things. The things with name brands were probably counterfeit. I know there were CPUs that couldn't be sold at the speed marked on them, because they'd crash. Like, someone would shave the top of the Pentium 133, and remark it as a Pentium 166. Sometimes they'd work. Sometimes we had to clock them at 150 or 133, or they'd crash almost immediately. It was so frustrating doing new builds. We'd build the machine, and then diagnose it for what parts were broken. It took a while to get enough parts for a test rig in the tech room. Just a known good configuration that we could plug new parts into, to see if they even worked. Before that, some of the "test" rigs were machines that hadn't been delivered yet. And sometimes those test rigs broke before, just because the parts were crap. The same way customers would get the machines home, and they'd break in the first week. The boss really didn't understand why we kept having people coming back, complaining that things broke. In his mind, all parts work, because he paid for working parts. There was no such thing as "quality'. If they didn't work, we did something wrong. We got into an argument about memory, because I sent it back to parts just labeled "bad". "Doesn't work." "Not good." "Doesn't boot at all." He paid for it. It works. Give it to a customer. I wouldn't ship a known DOA machine. I think parts may have been shipping our DOA parts out to mail order customers, but I wasn't really involved with parts. As I understood it, he went to jail for some illegal business stuff. Maybe tax stuff.
@@JWSmythe sounds like the kind of guy that would end up in jail. Can't take responsibility for bad buys, insists on passing broken things onto customers
I remember the effect these had in certain areas where anybody who was working class or middle age (w/ no children) or elderly would never even think of owning a computer then suddenly there were computers across the entire spectrum. You already knew alot about a household if they had an emachine and they mentioned it was their first computer. When I worked as a tech years later everybody was over 55 would bring in a 10 yr old eMachine for repairs.
My family got given one of these towers (except ours was a 433i with a Celeron). It was my first real experience with the internet. I remember I obliterated that computer's 98SE by downloading a theme pack that was a virus. I still remember the name of that theme. "A horse with no name". All the sounds were from that song.
Man the nostalgia is hitting me. This was my first computer that my dad bought for the family, back when there was only one PC for each household and everyone has to share time on it.
I remember the family computer! Ours was a Macintosh Performa 630CD circa 1995. It came with a 28.8k fax modem that I would get in trouble for tying up the phone line with. I think someone told my dad that macs were the best at the time, so instead of getting an affordable PC that I could have actually played games on, my dad had to borrow money from my grandparents to purchase.
@@bobthronton8661 My family’s first computer was a Mac Performa around that same time. Ours didn’t have a CD drive, though. It came with a modem but we never knew it until my dad bought another Mac a few years later so we could use the internet. When he found out the old one came with a modem he wasn’t happy!
e-machines with all its many flaws was very friendly to upgrade compared to other brands back then. i remember selling alot of these emachines back in my retail days. for folks with little budget for a computer, it wasnt so bad compared to the more pricer hps and compaqs we sold in store. Emachines never gave us issues returning systems back to them when the customer returned them in stores. i remember just taking out parts like hd and ram and just slapping into customers pcs who bought lower end versions to give them a nice upgrade for their troubles and just sending back a unit with the parts missing.
I wondered at first how this thing was still working with the faulty capacitors back then but you explained it. I had an e-machine made a little after this one and it fell victim to capacitorpocolypse.
eMachines really were the Hyundai/Kia of Desktop computers. I had nearly forgotten about all the ridiculous Rebate gimmicks that the big PC manufacturers had back in the day. I def tried to convince my dad to buy me a Sony VAIO Laptop at like COMPUSA or somewhere on the basis that I was reading the pricing/rebate chart like a little kid (which I was). Dad wasn't having it.
That's more true than you might realize. eMachines was a brand from Korea Data Systems and Trigem, so it really, literally, WAS the Hyundai of computers.
@@LatitudeSky maybe Daewoo is more accurate, Hyundai didn't offer crazy warranties until their cars were decent, Daewoo was full on cheap crap (but often with good exterior design).
Kia? Believe it not, Kia actually makes some pretty nice vehicles especially for the price. I would much rather own a Kia than a janky ass GM or Chrysler, those two companies make pure crap.
@@makaveli087 Does being this big of a dumb f#ck come naturally, or is it something you work on daily? You know that I’m poor and you think that Kia’s greatest feature is USB ports? You might as well have just admitted to being an ignorant, misinformed moron. Good luck dipsh!t
My dad had gotten a Celeron PC that i basically grew up with for a few years... you playing Unreal Tournament, it LOOKS AND SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE I REMEMBER. The nostalgia hit was so hard there with that first group of rocket explosions...
This was my first computer. My dad always had a computer when I was growing up but this one was "mine." Love it. I remember getting this for Christmas when I turned 13 or so. It was awesome.
First machine I bought was an E-machines from walmart that had an athlon xp 2200+. It was around 2003 and I thought it was great for the price. I bought it because the first computer I had was given to me and it was from around 1996 and could barely run Eye of the beholder or anything. Got so frustrated with it that I had to buy a new one. I have built my own since that one but it still holds a nostalgic place in my heart.
I never had an emachine, but I do remember people getting them. I can't believe I missed the $0 cost. That early 2000s time of the PC explosion was an almost magical time... What a great video. Thank you!
nice review. My mom got one of these at costco back in those days. It was much cheaper than any other complete system so we went cheap instead of building custom from frys. The machine got her through med school. Beats the heck of out of a "brotha" word processor. Never died. Great choice of games btw! LOLS at the "from a certain point of view", mr. Kenobi :P
Neat to see this! A very similar machine was my first computer. I got mine free with the CompuServe subscription. My speakers were the same, but my keyboard looked to be a more generic design. My monitor was the same, too, I think. Windows 98. Old memories. Thanks for posting.
I had an eMonster 500A for my first PC, super upset with myself for scrapping it years ago - turns out they’re not terribly common! Came with Win98 and an ATI Rage 128 graphics card, a whole 16MB of VRAM!
I had a 500ix2 from Costco around 2001 ish. The floppy drive was part of a class action lawsuit that alleged it corrupted data. In the end I was able to get a refurbished PC in 2013. I will always remember that never obsolete sticker.
It’s 2012 and my friends dad had the same exact machine with all the stickers. Can’t believe that was ten years ago now, still extremely outdated at the time
The Emachines PC I had was abominable. It used to take 3 minutes to turn pages. When I upgraded to a Sony Scott Baio PC, I chained the Emachines tower to my bumper and dragged it behind my car. Watching the shards flying in my rearview mirror was one of the most edifying experiences of my life.
There must be something wrong with me because I got a good chuckle out of that...but I sorta did the same when I trashed my old Emachines tower before taking it to a hazardous waste depot. I took a hammer and literally smashed all the internals within - not just the hard drive!
@@SoldierOfFate lol that reminded me of a time at best buy when they wouldn't replace my laptop under the protection plan for the mobo dying, but they would if it was physically damaged beyond repair. so we left, dropped it out of my car at 40mph, ran over it a few times then brought it back to them in a ziplock bag
My grandparents had one of these when I was growing up, and my grandmother was diligent enough to actually go through and do all of the rebates specifically so she could claim to her friends that her computer was "Free". She had been paying for the upgrade paths and dial-up internet that was required to get the full rebate for YEARS and she actually had the unit replaced under their "Never obsolete" plan a few times. She only stopped using the computer in 2010 or so when she discovered video chat through Skype and wasn't able to get it to work on her ancient e-machines computer.
The ending of that story is adorable.
thats awesome, your grandmother is a legend lol
Yikes, can’t imagine using even the latest emachines model in 2010.
Please tell me she still has it
@@clouds-rb9xt “hate the poor” because they can’t imagine using an out of date machine? The person in the story was not poor. You are a very sad depressed person wrapped in leftist ideology and i wish when I was in your position someone had pointed out how disgusting and dumb I sounded. Get help.
I used to work at Best Buy back in the day these things were sold. The amount of pressure to 'attach' selling MSN Dial-up so the customer could 'save $400 instantly' was utterly insane. As a technician...selling these to people with the 'never obsolete' line really rubbed me the wrong way and I refused to use it as a selling tactic. Eventually the company figured out it would be better to keep technicians behind the tech bench and out of the way of the sales people.
it should've been illegal to not have the total cost of the service package on the advertisements. "free" -> tco 500 plus?
Yeah, technicians of all stripes make bad salespeople. Experience: I am one.
Same. I wound up quitting once they started that pressure. There was a lot of sales I just found difficult as it was in a moral grey zone. This "deal" was so glaringly dishonest I wanted nothing to do with it.
Same, worked at BestBuy, pressuring people into buying MSN and service plans was the worst
probably because techs are honest, knowledgeable and want people to get the best for their money ;)
This was my first PC. Now I see how my dirt poor parents afforded it lol. That PC was the single-most important thing to me growing up, and shaped me into who I am today. Thanks for the nostalgia and happy tears, Clint.
same here!!! I will always remember the anger I had when games like Planetside 1 would run at sub 5 FPS and become unplayable, but the emachine also generated some really great memories
Same here, haha. Dad bought me the computer and Abe's Odyssee back in 1997. I remember sniffing the computer right out of the box; that silicone-like smell of the circuit board lives with me to this day. Sometimes I'll smell something similarly plasticky and get flashbacks to the Radio Shack and the woman who sold it to us in the 90s. I remember the day vividly even though I was like 4 1/2 years old at the time. It feels almost like a time machine because I can see the clothes the woman is wearing and it's nothing like how women are dressed today. Skirt + a suit with that weird rough fabric similar to old couches.
Likewise, friend. I remember playing AoE 1 and 2 on this and just mashing cheat codes left and right.
Yup, the salvation of many a dirt poor kid including me. I work in IT now, and a good portion of my foundations came from keeping this exact PoS running through high school and college. I taught myself how to apply for scholarships and financial aid with it and many a late night Starcraft LAN party. Oh the horror of finding drivers for the LAN card I had to buy from Wal Mart to use university internet.
yeah this thing shaped my porn addiction too
That "new computer every 2 years" subscription plan actually seems ahead of its time
Yeah, it’s basically what apple does now
@@fhowland tru
What computers do you buy?
How so? My PC is 4 years old and going strong.
@@phattjohnson My comment was mainly referring to how a lot of products are going towards a subscription model now. Like the iPhone every year thing or Volvo's car subscription service that they were talking about
In 2000, I bought a $550 Emachine for the restaurant I was managing. Made all the financial reports, food cost, inventory, and ordering a breeze. I took it with me 2 years later and eventually gave to my mom. She used it until 2007 when she bought her own newer "Core-2-duo" haha. My sister's used the Emachine until 2010. It was awesome for the price and I certainly got my money's worth.
Similar story 2000 was my first pc. Honestly that was a luxury I now feel. We pulled it until 2006 as it was a great pentium 4 with 20 gb hard drive windows 98. 64MB ram and a huge 17 inch monitor from LG. It was a great Brio series by HP. Later I started buying cheapest computers 2010- 2018 AMD athlon that I got for 150 USD and later intel pentium G5460 which I am using now. Dad is using the old amd. I am exchanging this with with dad again. I will get another pc soon. PCs in my opinion last really long. But the market makes us feel that new ones are many times faster than what you have. For my job any small pc would work fine
This comment let me remember the times when we could buy something and not expect it to be artificially slowed down or have some built-in MI-style self-destruct thing in it triggered after 2 years.
wholesome :)
I still use my Dell inspiron core 2 duo laptop. Of course I have a more updated récent one, but for drawing pcb with an old version of eagle and ripping CD it's good enough. I also like that it have a dvd rom in it, so I don't need an external drive because I still use physical media.
@@TheMadAfrican1 they built it cheap because they did things like sucky tech support and they owned a company that made parts for it like the power supply that really sucked
I had a friend in high school who’s grandparents owned one of these and took the “never obsolete” promise very seriously. My friend tried getting them to upgrade to something newer but they always refused, citing the sticker meant it was “still a good computer”. They used it for emails and web browsing until it finally gave out in 2019 and they eventually got an iPad to replace it.
That’s almost kind of tragic lol
@@ericfelds6291 why?
@@robbiepmusic Imagine using your phone for 18 years. Like the same exact one.
That must have run at an absolute snails pace by 2019 😮😮
Probably carrying years of viruses along with them the whole way. :p
Who woulda thought there’d be a time, when someone not only makes but has a market for recreated AOL stickers… mind blown
The AOL metal boxes made great seed cleaning trays back when weed had seeds.
@@scotts.2624 back when weed had seeds.... way to make me feel like an old man
OMG my dad's computer had this exact same monitor back in the 90s!!! I remember that a friend made me a copy of Unreal Tournament, and I used to sneek out to the computer room to play when my parents were sleeping, because my mum will freak out if she saw me playing "violent" games...
I'ts incredible how much we enjoyed these old machines back in the days...
Lol, I rem the days of sneaking to play video games that my mom thought were violent. Goldeneye on N64 was one of them.
@@andrewgonzalez4230 golden eye and perfect dark for me lol
What a "Outlaw".
Imagine thinking unreal tournament was violent lol.
FYI - The dedicated buttons at the top (7:55) were actually tied to the specific crappy "walled garden" software provided by the company to which you were forced to subscribe if you wanted the big rebate. For example, an AOL-sponsored PC was pre-loaded with the AOL "operating system" which was essentially a desktop app that included all those features, including the AOL "browser" which only allowed you to see a tiny portion of the actual web. The banking and other buttons were tied to AOL-specific services and apps.
If I asked this via comment, it may not get read, but you seem to know a thing or two. Are eMachine and Gateway related? I can't say I've seen either since the days of when my dad had a few IBMs.
While it was true that earlier versions of AOL only had their "landing page" and newsgroups, by the time 3.0 came out, they had a normal web browser that could browse the wider internet. You could also use other browsers like Netscape or IE once you dialed up to the AOL service.
I actually liked AOLs newsgroup layout, it made things A LOT easier to find in the days before mass search engines made finding content easy. And since there were fewer people online back then, and content was more curated, it wasn't full of crap like the modern web is. I used to love downloading all matters of games for my PCs and Macs back in the day from AOL newsgroups.
At some point, AOL made it so you could directly dial their number, like any other ISP and you didn't need their software at all. I used them well into the mid 2000s, they were a godsend in rural areas. You could almost always find an AOL dialup number to connect to in the days before mass wifi became a thing.
@@hblackburn5580 Yes, they are related. Gateway was founded in 1987, and eMachines in 1998. Gateway bought eMachines in 2004 and Acer bought Gateway in 2007. Acer retired the eMachines brand in 2013 because it was unprofitable and became known for poor quality.
The Gateway brand is still around, but it's nowhere near as big as it once was. Their machines now are just bottom of the barrel disposable garbage made by Acer.
@@GGigabiteM Thanks so much! That actually answered more than expected. I always remembered liking Gateway's cow theme, but eMachines I remember being the standard classroom computer, and it makes sense because those things were just bricks of plastic IMO. I am using an Acer monitor, and it's pretty decent quality, as was the Acer PC I had in college during the Windows 7 days. I remember wondering where Acer came from, as it was the first PC I bought on my own, and I hadn't seen that brand before. It, and my Lenovo I bought in '17, took a lot of saving for as a broke student. IDK too much beyond the basics of PCs, but that's why I like channels like this!
i hated that crap.."bundle"....of garbage
I got this as a hand-me-down from my dad in about 2003.
I moved with my mom for the summer for a summer job and when I came back to my room and started the computer up, I heard a loud boom and sparks shot out of the PSU. Quality.
I still absolutely love those cheesy orignal eMachine stickers. Ended up buying and modding another eMachine tower after this swapping a P4 for a 6600 C2D and it was awesome.
eMachines really stepped up their quality of units after this and their CRT monitors too though.
My first pc was an eMachines. I remember my parents trying to sort out that pesky rebate. I remember finding it a decade later, wet from the storage unit; it started right up after some cleaning.
That rebate was a pain, considering it was cheap at the time.. Died out on me year later, nice little amd athlon machine. Glad I learned to put them together, which made my life easier to deal with them.
I worked at Best Buy at this time. I sold so many of these machines. It takes me back.
I shopped at Best Buy at this time. I thought you were a prick
I worked for Best Buy from 1997-2000. It looked totally different then than it does now. Every weekend people would be packed in there like sardines. Walls and walls of CRT televisions and tower PC's, the video game section dripping with PS1 and N64 games, rows upon rows of CDs and VHS cassettes, old school Nokia dumbphones everywhere...I could go on. I remember the day we got our very first HDTV and DVD player to put on display. I helped unbox it and set it up. Good times, and it'll never be like that again. You go to a brick and mortar any day of the week and they're dead.
@@RickyIcecubes In US maybe. In Canada Best Buy is boomin
are they still on sale? LOL
This was actually my first own pc I was given as a kid. I remember that keyboard and asking my dad what the heck the green buttons on top did, only to get a nice satisfying response of "just don't touch those..."
You had yourself a good dad. That's some great ancient wisdom, just don't touch that !
Classic dad move 😂
This was my favorite era of PC advertising, I loved walking through best buy and reading all the specs on everything
Now my phone apps won't even tell you how many GBs they are. I remember having to keep track of every little kilobyte!
@@squirlmy In Android app settings, you'll see the amount of storage they take. That's not the RAM amount, though.
Calling a PC 'never obsolete ' is like calling your ship 'unsinkable'
It refers to the $99 upgrade program mentioned on the sticker. In theory, if you signed up for the program, every 24 months you could return your PC (with original packaging and proof of purchase) to be upgraded to the specs of a PC that was currently available for the original purchase price. Of course, they only mention processor speed, so I doubt you'd have gotten more memory or disk space, even if those specs had changed.
No doubt it was one of those deals they expected very few customers to complete, even once, so how many upgrades they actually honored is anyone's guess.
Here's the fine print:
"Special eMachines™ Upgrade for $99 to eMachines™Network Members Only
Subscribe to the eMachines™ Network for 24 consecutive months and we’ll upgrade your eMachines™ for only $99 (plus shipping)!
Here’s how it works: If you live in the contiguous U.S. or Canada, we’ll contact you after you’ve subscribed to The eMachines™ Network for 24 months and offer to upgrade your eMachines™ PC to whatever processor technology is built into whatever eMachines™ PC you can buy at the time of the upgrade for whatever you paid for your original machine. For example, let’s say your eTower* PC was priced at $399 (not including promotional discount) and runs a 366 MHz processor, but at the time of the upgrade $399 would buy an 800MHz eTower. We’ll upgrade your eTower* to 800MHz.
All you have to do is ship us your PC within 90 days, plus $99 (or Canadian equivalent), proof of purchase and payment for return shipping. We’ll promptly upgrade it and return it. Note: you’ll have to back-up your data to avoid accidental loss, and use the original packaging (we have replacement packaging available). See more detailed information"
Yeah, and we all know both the Titanic and the Edmund Fitzgerald were unsinkable wink wink.
@@cyberman7348 SSDs were the real game changer in that regard. It breathed new life into my laptop at the time, and when my (modern) system SSD died a couple of years ago, I had to install a system HDD while I RMA'ed the broken drive. I couldn't believe how slow the computer was -- I was convinced something was completely broken with the Windows configuration but in the end had to put it down to running Windows on an HDD.
The sticker did promise to upgrade the pc every 2 years for $99.
@@cyberman7348 i7 3770 serves good. 16gb ram, can still add more. ssd's not even entirely necessary but deffo helps. video can be upgraded as time goes, 1060 6gb does well today. still on 1080p lcd
Man what a throwback. I used to sell these at Bestbuy. They were so popular especially for older folks wanting their first PC. The store got tracked on how many dial up internet deals we included, along with service plans and other accessories. Was the wild west of PC days because it was all so new.
Can not believe some one has recreated and marketed those vintage AOL stickers thats bloody ace.
Brb, just setting up a business making reproduction AOL install CDs
British!!!
@@jackroutledge352 I think I have about 100 originals in my loft. It seemed a shame to bin them but back then every single computer magazine you bought had one taped to the front.
I played countless hours of The Sims on this bad boy haha. Eventually, this became my computer once my parents upgraded and I literally disassembled it, upgraded the ram, and added a CDRW drive to it. This computer taught me how to work on computers and gave me the courage to build my own.
Same, I would play top down GTA on mine and learned how to handle PC hardware with this machine.
Sims and Runesscape. Then later on when I got to keep it for myself I started downloading and reading Translated Doujin and playing arcade emulators.
@@PetePuebla most definitely.
Why do you need courage to build a computer? Basically everyone can build a computer.
@@OCD-GUY this is true, but for me when I was 13 in the early 2000's it seemed like a foreign concept lol.
This reminds me of when my granny used to get all the “free with rebate” products from stores back in the 90s and 00s. She had a house full of stuff she got for free, like red hair dye that she would never use and 3 years worth of toilet paper. That was her “retirement plan”. She planned to sell all that stuff at flea markets if her bank account ran out or got too low before she passed away. Sadly, it just became a bunch of expired or moldy junk my dad had to throw away when she passed away.
I tried to buy some of that red hair dye from her one day and she wouldn’t part with it even for me. Offered her near full price and she still wanted to keep it “just in case”.
Hoarders always have an idea about what it'll be worth once it's gone... Horrible disease. I hope she was happy in the last days regardless.
Yeah, she was a Hoarder. Now we know so much more about that particular illness. Sad stuff, my condolences.
Sounds like her retirement plan worked out
She was definitely a hoarder. She grew up poor and then divorced with no work history, so I think it triggered some kind of serious anxiety in her that set it off. She always kept a spotless house before their divorce.
I did see hoarding tendencies before the divorce, but she kept all her antiques and collectibles neatly organized and put into storage. She had one storage building for things like overflow from her collecting and lawn furniture and so forth, and some closets and drawers with things stored in them, but she never bought more than she had room for until the divorce. It was truly sad, but at least it gave her some comfort.
Wow, your granny was prophetic - there was a severe toilet paper shortage crises during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Did she live long enough to live through Covid?
I used to "sell" these at Staples, usually as part of an MSNOnline bundle. About 5 of every 6 came back broken within a week or two. Usually due to dodgy power supplies. And when I later found out these things were being built in someone's garage often using second-hand parts, it was no surprise.
After a week or two?! Wow! Unbelievable. We had one at an office I worked in, such an incredible turkey of a computer. I was happy to be using a Mac G4, a total Cadillac of a computer
@@trashyraccoon2615 - They were notorious for having bad power supplies and eventually a scandal was uncovered where they were found to be using second-hand parts pulled from other machines.
That's what led to their bankruptcy and sale to Gateway, which wasn't much of an improvement.
The power supply in ours lasted for several years, but then stopped working shortly after a lightning storm. After I replaced the power supply though the thing kept going forever.
@FlyingMonkies325 That's so not true. I don't know who you're buying from, but I've owned nothing but pre-built computers, and they never went bad on me and I never had issue with the parts. My Alienware PC has lasted for much longer than it should have. If this were a common thing, it would reflect in the reviews for these machines. This stuff is pretty rare. Yes, there are some scam companies out there, but most of the big ones we know these days are pretty reliable. It would be pretty hard to get away with something like this these days. People would be talking about it on trust sites etc.
@@XeonProductions But it hasn't been forever yet?
One of my first "jobs" was selling systems very similar to these for my dad at age 10, they were so cheap at the time and the internet was only just becoming widely available, so we managed to sell one to almost every household in our small town. It was the first computer I owned too. Some of the houses and businesses that I sold them to still have them to this day, about 20 years later.
It's very nice they still have them. The plastic on the monitor, pressing the buttons, all that has been etched in my childhood neurons in ways that nothing at this age can get etched. I was just thinking why don't we use big beige PCs at school? Why does every student have a laptop and tablet they use to watch tiktok videos on when I'm teaching math? I want more beige computers.
I just hope those computers aren't still connected to the internet to this day...
We had eMachine eTower growing up. It came with a Pentium 3 500 MHz, a Voodoo 3, 128 MB of RAM, and a DVD-ROM drive. It was an awesome PC, I remember loving gaming on it. It lasted a long time too, the only thing I ever had to replace in it was the power supply. It's still kicking around in storage at my dads house.
push it push it push the greetings key I dare you
Sold so many of these when I worked at Best Buy. The “Free” computer deals were crazy. Management was stoke and I’m like 16 and asking how much does the subscription to MSN cost?
It was funny because it was when adults realized they could find porn online and all the awkward “so I heard you could find anything on the internet?”
around what year was that?
@@bunnycat24 Nineteen dickety-twelve.
@@bunnycat24 the ancient year of 1998 probably
men only want one thing and it’s disgusting
an e-machine
@@phattjohnsonWe got the word "twenty" back from the Kaiser.
Haha, I “sold” these at Best Buy as my first real job. Sold is in quotes because I was terrible at my job. I can still remember my manager pushing us to sell “Performance Service Plans” and ink along with every printer sold.
We would buy those plans if I ever thought the company wanted to honor a plan. I always figured its just some ripoff so if something happens there's like a denial-all-service-claims Section U in some big hidden book somewhere and you aren't covered.
I once applied to get one of these in late 1999 or early 2000. I never go it, the demand for a "free" computer was too high.
I could never do that job. I'd feel so guilty selling stuff I know is unnecessary.
I remember working at Best Buy for a short time back in 2008. I was a Geek Squad "agent" lol.
Also, I remember them pushing me to sell services that customers didn't need. This old lady brought in a computer that just had a loose connector and they made me charge her $175 for an advanced diagnostic and repair. I felt bad.
They would yell at us to sell those service plans. Like, literally yell.
@@kebas239 i'm not sure they're quite like that anymore, i got a prebuilt (i know, hilarious, i cant build a pc, shove it up ya) and i had problems for a while because the power supply was defective and the fans were super weak, the guy i talked to at the next-closest best buy to me actually had us buy some case fans off of amazon that _he_ personally recommended. he was cool as hell, even told me that the radiator i had was complete garbage (120mm/1 fan, yikes). i can tell he didnt do it out of "manager told him to" and was trying to help.
Holy crap! I bought an eMachine back in 1999. It was my first "good" computer lol. It was a great little computer though! I taught myself HTML and web design on that thing, and got into a little bit of photo editing too. I worked it hard, and it held up quite well. I ended up retiring it 4 years later when I decided to build my own PC and upgrade my computing experience quite a bit! I still have fond memories of computing on my eMachine though. Good times!
@zoiu tooi yeah what a mistake that was the ipad 2 kicked it's ass
My dad bought a similar EMachine around 2000 (probably at Walmart), and it was actually pretty decent. I'll never forget the stickers on the front, just like this one, lol. I remember the flip down door on the front for port access, very clever. That power button click really brings back memories. I think he got around seven or eight years out of it, before switching to a laptop.
@@Gr8thxAlot mine came with a 4.3 GB hard drive and I remember telling my mom that I'll never use/need more than that lol. Oh how ignorant I was about future tech!
Same here and my eTower 300K can easily still browse the Internet in Puppy Linux. I can also use Windows 98 on it too,It still works reliably in 2022
Mine was a Packard bell in the fall of 1998. With a whopping fast state of the art 200mhz processor and 16 mb of ram. Still cost over 1000$ and it was obsolete in a year because processor speeds doubled just a few months later and cost the same price. And by the end of 1999 the 800mhz chips were out and while my mobo did support up to 400mhz and 64mb of ram. After fully maxing it out it was still half as powerful as what was on the market for less than what I paid for it. Luckily my upgrades were stuff a friend gave me when he upgraded. So I didn't have to pay for it. I think I did buy an 80$ memory stick.
Clint, I almost bought this exact system at VCF 😄 Glad that someone else who can appreciate it was able to pick it up. I really wanted to meet you while I was there but the timing didn't work out. Just wanted to say thanks for the years of awesome content, you are the best!
How much were they asking for it?
This was my first computer. Not at all the only computer we had, but it was the first one I called my own, the first unit I ever worked on and upgraded (for The Sims 2!)
I loved her, I still do :)
Edit: I don't know if you'll have the same issue I did, but the recovery media doesn't load the sound driver properly, and needs to be installed afterwards.
Yass Sims 2
I believe they made the same model with the two different sound chips and the recovery disc only had the AC 97 driver. If I remember right. I used to sell these at Circuit City and remember it being an issue
why "never obsolete" was nonsense?
There was a period of several years around this era where every time I did a clean install of Windows, the sound driver never loaded - didn’t matter what brand of PC it was.
@@Sashazur That makes sense too. The AC97 was the one the guy above said always loaded but it never worked for me on a clean install.
Can confirm, I had one of these, it was a model from a couple years later, and the optical drive does have a rounded front to match the bezel of the machine. It was my first computer so I had a lot of affection for it even though it was pretty terrible tbh. I got a lot of milage out of The Sims, though, and even managed to play and beat Morrowind on lowest settings. Got to walk around in a fog and stare at the ground so it wouldn't take so long to load each area.
I literally just bought and restored an eTower 766id with original stickers (and Windows ME...), so this is well timed! As suggested, the 566ir was my family's first "modern" computer so the nostalgia for these models is strong.
Did you actually do the rebate stuff? Was it a scam?
This channel made me dig out the old Inspiron laptop I had that an old IT client gave me when they were cleaning out their storage. Works great too, P3 1.1Ghz, maxed out SDRAM to 512MB, tossed in an 80GB 7200RPM drive & snagged an old 1280x1024 LCD for nostalgia's sake. Love firing it up & playing all my old 20+ year old games in all their original retro glory 😁
I got a mid 2000s version. Probably around '04 or '05. My parents got it for me when I was going into middle school and it was becoming much more common to have to do online research and typing up papers for school. I remember my dad, even back then, was really into the parental controls stuff and had website blockers as well as an automatic shutdown software on it that would turn the system off at 9pm. So many stressful nights of trying to wrap up conversations with my friends on MSN Messenger and AIM before I'd get booted off lol. But then I also got my uncle's hand me down graphics cards to put into my system to help me run better games (I mostly just remember Anno 1404 and Battle for Middle Earth 1 & 2).
But yeah, I had that machine until just like a few months ago. Hadn't used it since like 2010 when I got my first laptop for college, but I booted it up after sitting in the closet for over 10 years and it felt like looking at a yearbook/diary. I used to save my MSN and AIM chat logs into Word Docs so I got to read some pretty cringy stuff lol. And I also used to be somewhat into photography and had a cheap digital camera in high school and so I had a bunch of photos from those years that I had never gotten around to putting on my Facebook.
@Baxi I played Heroes! :)
I just remember when I first played WoW I would completely lose track of time and when I finally thought of checking it was time to get ready to drive a school bus.
I went into parental controls and had it kick me out at bedtime, but it didn't give me any warning. There I was, fighting monsters, and then suddenly I was kicked out.
Wait, what?! How is it already bedtime?!
I usually logged in the next day and needed to run back to my corpse.
Maybe you should try to remaster those photos with AI on a modern computer
@@---capybara--- Is there AI that enlarges and enhances pictures without making eyes and teeth look disturbing?
You're so lucky that you saved your chat logs like that! I'd kill to see what all I wrote on aim and Myspace back in those days. I very genuinely still miss Myspace and wish it made a full on comeback to take Facebook down a few pegs.
Yeah I had friends who had parents like that. I wish my parents had been that careful with me. I got into some stuff that I definitely shouldn't have been doing, and people I certainly shouldn't have talked to.
My funniest memory of emachines was when I worked at office depot, selling these things (by the truck load!) some models had the Cyrix CPU chip in them.... Those things were the WORST! We had to literally disable the screensaver because if it ever tried running it, the system would bluescreen..... Freaking hilarious! Made it easy to upsell to a better model or brand!!
I wonder if someone has made a sleeper PC out of the case… Could really give a meaning to “never obsolete” 😂
I’ve been thinking about doing this with an original Xbox case lol. I happened to find an OG Xbox in the dumpster at my apartment, so I took it with the intent to repair it. Seems to just have a dead hard drive, so I might just gut it and save the internals for later and build a gaming PC in the case. At the same time, the OG Xbox is a year or two away from being considered “antique” and considering it’s massive impact on gaming, a refurbished OG Xbox might be worth a lot of money
Whats a sleeper PC?
@@Pioneer_DE Beast rig in a junk case
I wonder if it would be able to cool off a 14900K...
i already did
I completely agree with you on trying to preserve these PCs... they are our history. And honestly they can be quite fun today. I'd recommend a Voodoo 3 PCI in that if you have one. I have a 566i and it is a ton of fun.
All of these comments are making me want to dig out my eMachines 633ids and attempt to restore it.
@@jimdayton8837 Do it
Oh man, I'd love nothing more than to build a 2000s era PC with a Voodoo 2 and an Intel Pentium 4 lol and Windows XP. That would be pretty awesome. To me, the very early 2000s was the pinnacle of PC gaming. The gaming industry was just starting to fully embrace 3D gaming, the games that were coming out around then were full of heart, soul, and passion, and the market itself was very vibrant and alive. Compared to today where all we get are six different versions of Call of Duty or the re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-release of Skyrim: Smartfridge Edition. Why yes, I am wearing a pair of rose tinted glasses, STFU lol.
Low-end PCs were sure getting dirt-cheap by the late '90. In 1999 my dad bought a bottom-of-the-line Compaq Presario with a Cyrix MII 366 processor, 64 MB of RAM, 4.3 GB hard drive, and 32X CD-ROM for around $300 (not including monitor).
if you worked in retail sales at the time in the late 90s, it was crazy how fast many things were moving in certain segments. home DVD alone dropped so fast in price to become attainable to regular consumers even before ps2, and the bottom of prices started falling out of vcrs. lots of 2 head mono junk started coming out again.
to be fair, monitors are still pretty darn expensive as standalone peripherals.
Big reason a bunch of mom and pop PC shops went out of business. I know my pc business couldn't compete with the bigger pc builders in price around this time. But I did repair a bunch of these. I remember replacing a bunch of power supplies.
Didn't you do a video on that one? Does he still use it?
Wow. I'm not just imagining things. It was indeed *cheaper* to get machines capable of gaming in the early 2000's than it is today. Today seems to be the next 1992, with all the absurd prices for hardware.
I worked at best buy in this time period. It was wild, because eventually it got out in the media that people could break the contract and keep the $400 rebate. The day after that story broke on TV, there was a line around the block.
ruclips.net/video/6kJetXOPsfY/видео.html
a trip to a old Best Buy, yeah that is some serious pressure tactics!
Sent to me like they were dishonest scumbags forever
Sucks that there are two replies to your comment but because of the way the fascists at YT created the algorithm, I can see neither of them. Phuk Yootube!
@@awakentruth1116 I wonder if somebody reported my comment. Because I'm one of the people that commented
@@jacquestube it most likely never got published for real. if it contains words or sentences that YT considers BAD then it will only be shown to you and nobody else
I know my grandma never got involved in the whole rebate craziness, but we did have an e-Machine and I seriously loved it. It outlasted lots of towers we have had, and Windows XP....it was just glorious. :)
Clint walks out of a computer show with an eMachine from 2000 in the midst of classic iconic 80s platforms... that's perfectly on brand here. 😅
I probably would do the same thing. The mid 90’s to early 2000’s is my favorite era of computers as it’s what I grew up with.
pitty the generation that only have boring smart phones to look back at and be nostaligic about - ugh!
@@TheSulross Same can be said for appliance PCs like this.
He might already have a lot of those others, but yeah I honestly find a lot of those 2000s computers kinda boring. Technically impressive in a lot of ways for their day but kinda "intangible", and all them very alike from brand to brand and none of them doing anything particularly different from another. Where the 80s stuff you have all kinds of varieties of graphical and audio capabilities and signature looks and sounds to each one, where these are all just framebuffers and streaming PCM audio. Obviously superior but just not very interesting or much different than we have today.
Would be neat if he did some eastern blok computers. I've recently found some youtubers who've been doing a bunch of those and it's neat to see what's similar and what's different.
I mean, why not? It's NEVER OBSOLETE.
I have a 466id still with labels like this one. Bought it new back in the day. Still have the keyboard. Still operates as new. Keep up the good work. Brings back memories from a good time.
If I remember right, the issue with onboard soundcards not being able to run as soundblaster cards was because the IRQ was not set correctly. Usually a quick fix in the bios to restore sound blaster functionality.
Also they had to be "Soundblaster PRO" I have seen some that had non standard settings, Packard Hells caused me grief.
That was only one piece in a large complex puzzle. Many of those cheap integrated sound chips had terrible drivers and terrible MPU-401 emulation. You also needed a VxD driver to expose the raw ports and IRQ to DOS programs running in Windows, which many of those sound chips didn't have. Microsoft at the time was trying to push hardware vendors to only provide WDM drivers to divest themselves of legacy DOS software, and many cheap integrated sound chips only had WDM drivers. This meant no sound in DOS games at all, even if you rebooted in pure DOS mode.
Lol late to this but I have the same model I picked up a few years ago. Sadly I think the irq/bios thing extends to more than soundblasters. I tried installed a different video card for funsies and...well nothing worked, even a generic 98se install the card never worked right. There's no way to disable on board video in my bios...kept conflicting.
There was an early VOIP company around that time that gave a free Gateway and free phone service through their company, presumably for being a guinea pig for the service. My grandparents got their first computer that way. I can't remember the exact details but it was a solid midrange system.
I was working at a Staples when eMachines first started coming out. All the tech center people were intrigued and excited by these new affordable computers. That didn't last. They were buggy as hell, didn't work well, and we had to constantly repair brand new machines people bought just a day or two before. (Our store managers basically had the attitude that if you bought it here, we should do anything we could to keep you happy. Heck, most of our repair work was just us honoring the BS extended warranties when the warranty company wouldn't.)
One day, one of our customers brought his machine back because something wasn't working right. (Don't remember exactly what. It was a LONG time ago.) He'd tried to contact eMachines customer support, but they just kept giving him the run-around.
The assistant manager finally gets hold of somebody (after well over an hour) at eMachines, who insists he needs to have the customer call them. He tries to explain that the customer did call, but could not get through. The rep kept insisting, refusing to help the manager to help the customer. Suddenly, the manager got a look of shock, and just mumbled, "he hung up on me..."
The manager sent multiple emails about the incident to the district supervisor, and about three or five levels further than that. Basically, everybody above him whose email address he had.
The next day, we were told to pull ALL eMachines. The manager ended up basically getting them pulled from every store for several years. (Though they later started carrying them again, but long after I left the company.)
Those things were utter garbage.
You describe the computing marketplace of the time so very well. I like the detail of 'what my parents would have bought' so much.
back when Celeron was a powerful cpu for the money🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
While I have the most nostalgia for Gateway and Packard Bell due to my personal life experiences, this thing is an absolute gem.
My family's first PC was a Packard Bell x286 with a 40mb HDD. Times sure have changed.
In the mid 90s, I trash-picked a IBM 8088 with a 10MB hard drive. I think a C64 was more capable. Actually my family's first computer was an Apple IIe with a monochrome monitor. Things have come really far since then!
I still have this machine, with all the stickers and it still works. Original Hardrive died about 3 years ago though. Original Floppy drive died quite sometime ago, around 2012. Still have all the documentation, mouse, original installation disc/floppies and the box. I don’t know why, but I miss the hum from older PCs like this. Happy to see you found one working.
Also, because the emachine pc was registered, years later I received a mail from Gateway, that due to a lawsuit, they were required to either give $ or equipment equivalent to $500 I believe. I ended up choosing a PC and Monitor from the options Gateway presented.
Ah yes, mail-in-rebates. An essential part of my PC building experience during the mid 2000s.
They're still around! I got a $20 rebate from MSI on my new Radeon RX 6600 a few months ago, now that the GPU drought is over.
Manufacturers still use them for peripherals like GPUs. They're typically used to push the price from "one of the cheapest" to "the cheapest" knowing that few people go through the hassle of cashing in on the offer. I've even gone as far as getting a rebate card (after weeks of waiting) and then forgetting to use it before the expiry date. Unless you're really strapped for cash, they're not worth the effort, so I tend to ignore them.
And the inevitable class action lawsuits, with the manufacturers correctly figuring after they pay off the plaintiffs and/or state attorney general with a settlement, they'll still be ahead based on those people who never sued or didn't care if they got the rebate.
Late stage capitalism!
In 1999 I bought the first CD Writer I saw for under £100, although that involved a £20 mail in rebate .
The irony of putting a "NEVER OBSOLETE" sticker on a computer in period of time that was PEAK Moore's Law
Reminds me of Weird Al’s “All about the Pentiums” song!
NIIIICE! I had this exact PC around 2001/2002. I upgraded mine with an nVidia MX-440, mainly so I could have composite out and play DN3D and Need For Speed III on my 27" TV. Good times.
The "Never Obsolete" sign right above the floppy disc is what gets me.
It just amazes me this thing still isn't obsolete.
@Potatoh But it is still working... and probably will run latest Xubuntu or light linux distro.?
@Potatoh 1GB of ram isn't even enough for Vista so no this won't run it. The motherboard on that thing is too limited. XP would most likely run decently on it.
@Potatoh Wrong, it's still not obsolete and never will be. Can't you read? Never obsolete.
Will it run Crysis?
Or is that meme obsolete now?
It's very very obsolete
I worked at Staples around that time. emachines were known as boomerangs because we knew they would be coming back to the store soon. It was so bad we told shoppers they were junk and sold them anything else.
That's weird, I had the model that came out right after this one and never had a single problem with it. I used it every single day, countless hours of burning cds, downloading from Napster and various other things and never had a single problem with it. Hell, it even had Windows Millennium and it still ran pretty damn considering its lack luster specs.
My first computer was an old Vectra that one of my mom's clients handed down to me. It ended up dying shortly after. Addicted to computers at this point, I begged my mom and sister for months after to get me one of these. I remember they had it for $50 after all those crazy rebates that Best Buy attached with that MSN dial-up bundle. Took like 3 hours to get it but I was literally glued to it for the next few years. Insane how it basically defined my life.
Literally glued to it? With glue? That’s child abuse.
@@ferretyluv My parents REALLY wanted me to be successful in the field.
I think I had the 566i. Yours is definitely faster than what II remember. We had the stock 64MB of ram and it was basically unusable after about a year. We eventually got an upgrade to 128 and became much more useable. When I learned about emulation, I bought a couple of cheap gamepads from walmart. Just about all we ever did was play snes and genesis games on it. Good times.
This just reminds me how amazingly the Unreal 1 engine worked on even the slowest hardware. It was such an incredibly impressive, optimized engine
Not on K6s, though. As an AMD fanboy for most of the time, I have to admit, UT runs like crap on every K6 to K6-3+. But those Mendocino Celerons like in the video were really great, at least on par with a PII with the same clockspeed, if not faster.
@@servooerk Really? I had a K6-3 around the time this came out and don't recall any major issues, used that CPU for far longer than I should have.
Yeah I remember, had an P2 450Mhz with a TNT2 back then and it run very well with good details
@@plaguis1391 Framerate drops if there's lots of action onscreen, the FPU simply can't keep up. Maybe a well optimized machine performs better, but the issue persists.
Whaoooo slow your role there buddy. Alot of us had to play in Software rendering mode because at that time having a GPU (called a 3d accelerator at the time) was rare.
The number of power supplies I've replaced on these back in the day, is nostalgic. I had one explode when the mouse tapped the side of the case.
That power supply really doesn’t want to exist
Are you sure that was a power supply and not a block of C4?
this is my favorite type of LGR content. just messing around, seeing how a handful of games run on a random older PC.
I had several eMachines when I was younger. Had an eOne, a T1100 and then a SFF and a full tower AMD quad core. Loved eMachines!
I dont know why, but I love all this 90s ewaste. Just makes me so happy to see all these old games up and running on the original hardware. I sooo wish I still had my old IBM. They are as rare as hens teeth where I live.
Picking up old machines with the original hard drives intact is awesome. It's like a time capsule for software you can't install let alone run anymore
CRt makes this game look amazing tbh. wish I still had a decent CRT
In Canada back around this time (early 2000s) the gov decided that a computer was a necessary tool that everyone should have access to. If you had a low enough income (can't recall the threshold) you could get one of these (or similar) for free. I know a bunch of students who got them since they were adults, but had a super low reported income.
Great video! I grew up in a smaller poorer farm town, and the nearest retail store was a Walmart that was about 45 minutes away, so eMachines were pretty much all we had in the late 90's, early 2000's.
I remember getting my first one, because at a friend's house I saw a video of Battlefield 2 being played on G4TV when they showcased PC games (what a time to be alive); however, the onboard video card was nowhere near powerful enough to run it, so my parents drove me about 2 hours away to a Staples where I purchased an ATI AGP video card which would suffice (though probably being at least double the cost of what it would have been on Tigerdirect or Newegg at the time); unfortunately, when it was installed I realized I needed an internet connection, which we didn't have.
Sad.
Wow, now this is a blast from the past. I remember having one of these in the late 90s and maybe even lasting into the very early 2000s. I remember in, something like 1998, emulating Chrono Trigger on this thing and beating it for the first (of many) times.
Those stickers eMachines slapped on their towers were definitely eye-catching, no doubt. I remember seeing eMachines systems in Circuit City, Best Buy, Office Depot, Staple's, etc. I opted for an HP mini tower system w/466 mhz Celeron, in 1999.
I had one of these emachine models I bought in 1999 or 2000. I also sold electronics and sold a ton of them. The good thing about these emachines was they were so cheap by the time it felt like you needed to upgrade it actually was cheaper to replace everything inside than buy a new tower. I remember over time literally replacing everything except the case and floppy drive. The good thing about the case was it had a lot of room to add additional hardware so you could get a lot of life out of a low end purchase.
I just love your videos! I'm a 90s baby and old computers are just something else.
OMG, The "Max Payne" mouse pad! My hubby had that for YEARS!!
The single most nostalgic thing in this video? Having to jiggle the monitor power button cause it gets stuck. That was a shockingly good bit of nostalgia for me.
Ha! Glad you think so. I almost re-shot that section to get it less stuck, but thought better of it since it seemed authentic to the thing
Loved my 366i2. I learned a lot of the inner workings of Win98 on it. The speakers were the first to go of course. Then I added RAM, a 4x CD-RW, a WinTV tuner, an Ethernet card and I think also a USB card if memory serves. Had it from 1998 to 2003. It ran 24/7 for those final two years when I used it as a personal file host.
Those old computers always have the "90s charm". Great Windows 98 computer.
it's in the Windows 98 era that I started building my tower computers instead of buying brand computers, so to me the golden age aspect was the proliferation of the build-your-own-PC at this time. Loved going to the stores that had shelves and shevels of all the parts
Good old days when computers crashed all the time and everyone considered it normal 😋
The unreal engine was phenomenal at that time. Impressive graphics in proportion the machines that could run it and still have tons of fun. I remember those days. Absolutely a milestone in gaming imho.
Ahh yes, the gold ol' days, haha. I remember being blown away when Unreal came out. It was fun seeing Unreal Tournament as well -- reminds me of my college days when I played that in team competition in an intercollegiate gaming league against other universities.
I miss UnreadEd
It's a shame that Unreal engine is now the most unoptimized engine out there, stuttering all the time and requiring you to have a state of the art computer to run a game with barely good graphics.
@FlyingMonkies325 Daggerfall didn't really have the mass appeal though, did it?
Absolutely, I remember playing quake on an emachine, was amazing days.
I had this EXACT computer. It was my dad’s upgrade from a Compaq Presario, and both eventually ended up being passed down to me and my siblings when my dad got something nicer 😂. I remember going to the Circuit City on e86th street in manhattan with him to buy these computers, and the massive amounts of paperwork he had to do. I remember alternating between AOL & Compuserve a couple times, likely because he signed up for one of these deals lol. I ran that eMachines tower until probably 2006. It performed pretty well with some ram and hdd upgrades. I miss the early 2000s. Thanks for this!
they were very upgradeable which made them such a great machine to work with.
An old friend of mine had one of these for his first year of uni and we got a lot of fun out of complaining about how 'not great' it was at the time. I'm gonna send him video this to reminisce about those days
I had an Emachine when I was a kid and I learned how to gut it and put better parts in from other broken computers. That green button brought back memories!
12:32 I remember our PC had everything midi an octave higher too! For some reason it was only on Windows 98 though, not when we had 95, and it was mono too, but was stereo in 95. IIRC we had a Genius brand soundcard. Soundmaker 32x i think it was.
I was an IT tech for a small architectural firm in '99-'01 ish. This is super nostalgic for me. And I remember wondering if it was worth upgrading the entire office from NT 4.0 to 2000, then again to XP shortly after that. What a wild west sort of time the market was, especially as a hobbyist.
Migrating from Win 2k to XP was only needed once Wink2k was EOL a couple years prior to XP EOL I would still be using my Win2K pro install if it was not EOL by a decade+.
@@JETWTF It needed to be upgraded sooner because certain upgraded applications required it. Why did we upgrade like that? Because the boss said to do it, LOL.
Aww man, I miss Windows NT 4.0. It was when MS Windows was made primarily for business, and professionals. And had a no-nonsense no frills attitude.
It was too old to work with my dedicated retro programming machine, so I'm using 2Kpro (disconnected from the internet as a stand alone of course)
However, I should consider upgrading the server soon. I'm still stuck on Server 2008!
the explosion of cheap, easy to replace pc's back then was nuts, I remember home insurance and other deals where they would chuck in pc's as a signing bonus, my granny got a brand new emachines with her policy, with free net for 12 months, once that ended, she signed up for 2 years at £19.99, and got another pc.
What home insurance company was she with?
That, and gaming was more readily available. You didn't need to build your own NASA server to play video games on your PC, my buddy had an old Dell computer from 2001 that we were able to play WoW on with no problems. Now? You have to have a frikkin' battleship class PC just to run CoD. I miss being able to hang on to a Dell home computer for like 10 years, and still be able to play everything. I just built my gaming PC like 4-5 years ago and I'm already looking into replacing parts because some of my games are getting laggy.
@@Rickety the other problem is the technology games use is essentially growing exponentially, outdating components extremely rapidly
@Tommy Madison We can also try not to be such graphics whores. My $1200 MSI GL75 with an RTX2070 doesn't have much trouble playing most modern games at 1080p at 60fps.
.....well, there's still Microsoft Flight Simulator and DCS and me being an avgeek, tho
@@Rickety How much did it cost in 2000? I forgot. Now you can run any game you want at high, sometimes ultra,1080p 60fps for $500 to $600; for the complete computer.
LGR thank you so much for taking the time to make these videos. I don't have the energy nor the expertise and I'm glad you've found a way to monetize on the nostalgia!!! ❤️
I love these eMachines because they're so easy to find out and about. They make for useful backup 98 machines for when you're swapping out components on your main DOS machine, but still want to use your disks and floppies instead of DOSBox to play your games.
Working in a independent computer store in the early 2000's I hated working on these. We had a lot come in for upgrades as well, installing cheap AOpen AW-840 and TNT2 video cards so they were somewhat usable.
Hey Clint! Great video as always! I remember growing up my neighbor had an emachines laptop and we'd play Minecraft together sometimes using it. Another emachines related memory was when I was getting into computers and just wanted any computer that I could get my hands on I got quite a few emachines XP machines along the way. Also thanks so much for signing my model M and hope you enjoy the Reuters keyboard!
In the early 2000's I worked at Staples. We had a 90% failure rate on the Emachines pc's. One lady wanted one so bad we literally made 1 good machine out of 3. It was ridiculous. I was so happy when I was able to quit working there.
Sounds like a store I worked in, in the mid/late 90s. All the parts were white label things. No company. No tech support. And you had to guess at some things. The things with name brands were probably counterfeit. I know there were CPUs that couldn't be sold at the speed marked on them, because they'd crash. Like, someone would shave the top of the Pentium 133, and remark it as a Pentium 166. Sometimes they'd work. Sometimes we had to clock them at 150 or 133, or they'd crash almost immediately.
It was so frustrating doing new builds. We'd build the machine, and then diagnose it for what parts were broken. It took a while to get enough parts for a test rig in the tech room. Just a known good configuration that we could plug new parts into, to see if they even worked. Before that, some of the "test" rigs were machines that hadn't been delivered yet. And sometimes those test rigs broke before, just because the parts were crap. The same way customers would get the machines home, and they'd break in the first week.
The boss really didn't understand why we kept having people coming back, complaining that things broke. In his mind, all parts work, because he paid for working parts. There was no such thing as "quality'. If they didn't work, we did something wrong. We got into an argument about memory, because I sent it back to parts just labeled "bad". "Doesn't work." "Not good." "Doesn't boot at all." He paid for it. It works. Give it to a customer. I wouldn't ship a known DOA machine. I think parts may have been shipping our DOA parts out to mail order customers, but I wasn't really involved with parts. As I understood it, he went to jail for some illegal business stuff. Maybe tax stuff.
@@JWSmythe sounds like the kind of guy that would end up in jail. Can't take responsibility for bad buys, insists on passing broken things onto customers
@@michaelwerkov3438 I've learned a lot from these sleezy business people. Mostly, things not to do to customers, and spotting sleezy shops sooner.
It’s crazy how fast machines go obsolete, I had a window XP growing up these machines bring back great memories.
I remember the effect these had in certain areas where anybody who was working class or middle age (w/ no children) or elderly would never even think of owning a computer then suddenly there were computers across the entire spectrum. You already knew alot about a household if they had an emachine and they mentioned it was their first computer. When I worked as a tech years later everybody was over 55 would bring in a 10 yr old eMachine for repairs.
That was in the 90s right?
My family got given one of these towers (except ours was a 433i with a Celeron). It was my first real experience with the internet. I remember I obliterated that computer's 98SE by downloading a theme pack that was a virus. I still remember the name of that theme. "A horse with no name". All the sounds were from that song.
Obviously a "Trojan Horse"!
Man the nostalgia is hitting me. This was my first computer that my dad bought for the family, back when there was only one PC for each household and everyone has to share time on it.
I remember the family computer! Ours was a Macintosh Performa 630CD circa 1995. It came with a 28.8k fax modem that I would get in trouble for tying up the phone line with. I think someone told my dad that macs were the best at the time, so instead of getting an affordable PC that I could have actually played games on, my dad had to borrow money from my grandparents to purchase.
@@bobthronton8661 My family’s first computer was a Mac Performa around that same time. Ours didn’t have a CD drive, though. It came with a modem but we never knew it until my dad bought another Mac a few years later so we could use the internet. When he found out the old one came with a modem he wasn’t happy!
e-machines with all its many flaws was very friendly to upgrade compared to other brands back then. i remember selling alot of these emachines back in my retail days. for folks with little budget for a computer, it wasnt so bad compared to the more pricer hps and compaqs we sold in store. Emachines never gave us issues returning systems back to them when the customer returned them in stores. i remember just taking out parts like hd and ram and just slapping into customers pcs who bought lower end versions to give them a nice upgrade for their troubles and just sending back a unit with the parts missing.
Maybe this is what led eMachines to insolvency :>
I wondered at first how this thing was still working with the faulty capacitors back then but you explained it. I had an e-machine made a little after this one and it fell victim to capacitorpocolypse.
eMachines really were the Hyundai/Kia of Desktop computers. I had nearly forgotten about all the ridiculous Rebate gimmicks that the big PC manufacturers had back in the day. I def tried to convince my dad to buy me a Sony VAIO Laptop at like COMPUSA or somewhere on the basis that I was reading the pricing/rebate chart like a little kid (which I was). Dad wasn't having it.
That's more true than you might realize. eMachines was a brand from Korea Data Systems and Trigem, so it really, literally, WAS the Hyundai of computers.
@@LatitudeSky maybe Daewoo is more accurate, Hyundai didn't offer crazy warranties until their cars were decent, Daewoo was full on cheap crap (but often with good exterior design).
Kia?
Believe it not, Kia actually makes some pretty nice vehicles especially for the price. I would much rather own a Kia than a janky ass GM or Chrysler, those two companies make pure crap.
@@kwantoon Well, That's because you're poor. Such is life. What's KIA well-known for nowadays? Their built-in USB ports, is it? Great feature.
@@makaveli087 Does being this big of a dumb f#ck come naturally, or is it something you work on daily?
You know that I’m poor and you think that Kia’s greatest feature is USB ports? You might as well have just admitted to being an ignorant, misinformed moron. Good luck dipsh!t
My dad had gotten a Celeron PC that i basically grew up with for a few years... you playing Unreal Tournament, it LOOKS AND SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE I REMEMBER.
The nostalgia hit was so hard there with that first group of rocket explosions...
Unreal actually ran on that garbage? Here I am thinking how would it run Quake II?
Had one of these in grade school, got from Best Buy when the Micron computer died and Best Buy replaced with this under warranty. Memories..
Actually, reverse that, this eMachines died and it was replaced with a Micron.. LOL went from 566mhz to 700mhz for "FREE" and mind was blown
This was my first computer. My dad always had a computer when I was growing up but this one was "mine." Love it. I remember getting this for Christmas when I turned 13 or so. It was awesome.
so you need a never obsolete sticker to put on your computer so that it is never obsolete and then it will always work till it dies on you
Cool! Thanks for sharing
First machine I bought was an E-machines from walmart that had an athlon xp 2200+. It was around 2003 and I thought it was great for the price. I bought it because the first computer I had was given to me and it was from around 1996 and could barely run Eye of the beholder or anything. Got so frustrated with it that I had to buy a new one. I have built my own since that one but it still holds a nostalgic place in my heart.
I never had an emachine, but I do remember people getting them. I can't believe I missed the $0 cost. That early 2000s time of the PC explosion was an almost magical time... What a great video. Thank you!
nice review. My mom got one of these at costco back in those days. It was much cheaper than any other complete system so we went cheap instead of building custom from frys. The machine got her through med school. Beats the heck of out of a "brotha" word processor. Never died. Great choice of games btw! LOLS at the "from a certain point of view", mr. Kenobi :P
Good to see a machine on LGR that is definitely not obsolete!
Neat to see this! A very similar machine was my first computer. I got mine free with the CompuServe subscription. My speakers were the same, but my keyboard looked to be a more generic design. My monitor was the same, too, I think. Windows 98. Old memories. Thanks for posting.
I had an eMonster 500A for my first PC, super upset with myself for scrapping it years ago - turns out they’re not terribly common! Came with Win98 and an ATI Rage 128 graphics card, a whole 16MB of VRAM!
I had a 500ix2 from Costco around 2001 ish. The floppy drive was part of a class action lawsuit that alleged it corrupted data. In the end I was able to get a refurbished PC in 2013. I will always remember that never obsolete sticker.
They gave you a refurbished computer in 2013 due to a computer you bought in 2001?
It’s 2012 and my friends dad had the same exact machine with all the stickers. Can’t believe that was ten years ago now, still extremely outdated at the time
The Emachines PC I had was abominable. It used to take 3 minutes to turn pages. When I upgraded to a Sony Scott Baio PC, I chained the Emachines tower to my bumper and dragged it behind my car. Watching the shards flying in my rearview mirror was one of the most edifying experiences of my life.
“One of the most Edifying experiences of my life “ 😂
There must be something wrong with me because I got a good chuckle out of that...but I sorta did the same when I trashed my old Emachines tower before taking it to a hazardous waste depot. I took a hammer and literally smashed all the internals within - not just the hard drive!
@@SoldierOfFate lol that reminded me of a time at best buy when they wouldn't replace my laptop under the protection plan for the mobo dying, but they would if it was physically damaged beyond repair. so we left, dropped it out of my car at 40mph, ran over it a few times then brought it back to them in a ziplock bag
That boot up sound never gets less satisfying
I'd love to see what half-life looks like on this thing, retail was '98 and also had software rendering available so should work ~hopefully~