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From: BearItAll on 16 May 2005 08:39
Just a note of praise.

I had to do a quickie server for a company on Friday. So nipped to PC
World and got an Emachine 6260 (AMD 64 3500+), looks a very good spec for
the price.

It came with MS Win on a SATA 350G, unfortunately for most the particular
SATAs they use will not be recognised without additional drivers, Redhat
didn't even know the drive was present, but MDK and Suse are fine with it,
but I'm always reluctant to use a SATA as the main drive of a server. As
it happened I had a semi-prepared IDE drive to fit into it anyway.

Initially to have a look around I had booted it with the MS Win, I found
it was ok, not as great on speed as I was expecting, in fact a distinct
sluggishness about it. But I didn't suspect it was MS Win that was causing
it. Then I fitted my drive (FC3 32 bit) and booted, that was sluggish
too. plus a lot of oddities like the loss of the built in nic after it
has initialised on start up, but able to re-enable it from the command
line and other unusual hardware errors like the 'sound - cpu overload'.

So I decided on a complete install, maybe i had made a mistake with some
of the prepared device files, and might as well go for the 64 bit. But
that was the same.

I know why now, apparently the way emachines is able to balance a good
machine at a good price is because they fit a crappy power supply, they
are apparently well known for it. Nowhere near up to the job of this
particular machines spec.

So I bought a decent power supply, the machine plus the cost of a power
supply is still less than other machines of this spec. Now I would say
that it is one of the best machines that has passed through my hands, I
was very reluctant to hand it over to the company I set it up for, still
have marks on my hands where they had used the crow bar.

Plus, for those that want to try a dual boot Linux but are reluctant to
let it touch their mbr, the emachines have a very simple menu just before
boot that lets you select the boot device, so you can put Linux on a
second drive and not have to worry about grub/lilo booting anything except
your Linux installation. But also if you at sometime add a network
boot, that same menu is ready for you to select it.


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