Emachines e350 netbook €189 @ Harvey Norman

Just picked up one of these on Friday from Harvey Normans in swords, their other branches have them too, fantastic deal, and I'm surprised at the performance I'm getting out of it.

160gb HDD, 1gb ram (upgradeable to 2gb), 1.6 ghz intel atom CPU, 1024 x600 screen, 3 cell battery, wireless, webcam, and €199 with windows 7 starter or a €189 option with xp home sp3.

The Xp home version is a real bargain. That's a solid, fully featured OS that doesn't eat batteries or ram, and is a tenner cheaper than the crappy windows 7 starter package which is terrible and more resource hungry. I messed about with it over the weekend and got it running perfectly tuned and tweaked, and it's excellent value for the price. For anyone looking for a basic coffee table browsing machine it's ideal.

Timmaay

Looks good, other then the batterylife at 3hrs is abit rubbish for a netbook. Also, I'm getting use of windows7 and would be slow enough to go back to xp, could i put the full version of windows7 on it, or is that asking for trouble with only a gig of a ram? I would be temped to put android x86 on it either also!

frankiebaby

A good option would be to put Ubuntu Netbook edition on it which is specifically designed to optimise the Intel Atom CPU and for smaller size screens. It is available with version 10.04 and 10.10 of ubuntu. It is a completely free OS much better than windows in almost every way if you ask me.
If you don't want to venture into the linux side of things, id go with XP. I have a very similar speced netbook which was very slow under win 7, It has 1gb ram, intel atom CPU. I put xp on it and it was much better.
Also, why not do a dual boot. You will have a choice of OS's on startup, XP or Ubuntu or Android x86 if you want.
Oddly enough, my setup on my netbook is, XP Pro sp3 and Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Remix with a virtual machine running in Ubuntu with Android x86.
Ubuntu Netbook is much faster than XP in my experience.

Timmaay

Timmaay wrote: »

Looks good, other then the batterylife at 3hrs is abit rubbish for a netbook.......could i put the full version of windows7 on it, or is that asking for trouble with only a gig of a ram?

You're spot on on the battery, it was the only thing that concerned me on the spec, the main reason i went for XP on it was battery life and performance is about 20% better on that spec than win 7 starter would give you. I've tweaked the performance settings, services, visual effects, etc on the OS and i can get around 3.5 to 4 hours continuous use out of it on battery before it needs a charge. That was about what i figured it would be from the spec, but i basically took that as a trade off against the price. I mean, how wrong can you go for 189?

I guess it's down to how you plan to use the machine. A 3-cell wouldn't be suitable for a netbook that was on the go, out and about all day, but that battery life isn't a problem for me based on how i use it (mostly at home), and if i need to i can pick up a replacement 6-9 cell battery cheap on ebay. Even with that AND a ram upgrade to 2GB on top of the 189 price tag it would still be a good spec for a nice price, and it's a solid well designed netbook, with decent looks and good build quality, and a better keyboard than some machines I've seen for twice that price.

Re; your Q on upgrading to win 7 full, i wouldn't even chance it without boosting the ram first. Win7Full is a good bit hungrier than XP. I turn off all the fancy graphics & effects etc as soon as i take a machine out of the box anyway, i'm more interested in performance than looks, so XP was perfect for me. It's stable, tweakable, and fully featured without paying the resources premium that W7F would demand, but if you can't deal with XP's basic looks i would just look at some of the open source netbook optimised systems out there like ubuntu, as has been posted already.

frankiebaby

For 189, you can't really go wrong. If you require battery life over 3 hours, then just get an increased sized battery as said above.
The netbook I have is basically the exact same, it is an Asus branded one but eMachines are made by Asus, kind of a cheaper range but I can't fault the build quality of them. I got my sister an emachines laptop over a year ago and it's still in top condition.
Mine has a 9 hour battery but I've had it over a year, and never needed it for that long. The 3 hour battery would do me fine, and I bring it between work and home and offsite.
A ram upgrade is a nice option too and at 189, you can't be disappointed. Mine was up around 350-400 euro mark over a year ago when I got it!

unkel

frankiebaby wrote: »

A good option would be to put Ubuntu Netbook edition on it which is specifically designed to optimise the Intel Atom CPU and for smaller size screens. It is available with version 10.04 and 10.10 of ubuntu. It is a completely free OS much better than windows in almost every way if you ask me.
If you don't want to venture into the linux side of things, id go with XP. I have a very similar speced netbook which was very slow under win 7, It has 1gb ram, intel atom CPU. I put xp on it and it was much better.
Also, why not do a dual boot. You will have a choice of OS's on startup, XP or Ubuntu or Android x86 if you want.
Oddly enough, my setup on my netbook is, XP Pro sp3 and Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Remix with a virtual machine running in Ubuntu with Android x86.
Ubuntu Netbook is much faster than XP in my experience.

Agree with pretty much all of your post, but windows 7 is a nice and quick OS. XP is getting a tad old now, I installed it first in March '01 :eek:

Spend €25 on a 2GB DDR3 stick and sell the 1GB one for €15 (total net spent €199 on the Windows 7 netbook) and Bob's your uncle :cool:

hellboy99

http://www.harveynorman.ie/emachine-e350.html

peckerhead

unkel wrote: »

Spend €25 on a 2GB DDR3 stick and sell the 1GB one for €15 (total net spent €199 on the Windows 7 netbook) and Bob's your uncle :cool:

This. I got the (very similar) MSI Wind U100 Plus on offer for €199 in Maplins, of all places, and it now very happily runs Windows 7 Professional. Only difference was mine came with a 6-cell battery.

fdevine

Currys/PC World are doing the eMachines 355 (250Gb HDD) with Windows 7 Starter for €179.99

They also have three different Acer netbooks for €199.99, all with Win7 Starter