New PC Pricing

[Lang Murphy]

Interesting ad in this week's CompUSA Sunday flyer. Front page.

An eMachines MCE PC with an Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 3800+, 512MB RAM, 200GB
hd, 15" LCD ($20 to upgrade to 17"... seems like a well spent $20...) with a
FREE (LOL) Express upgrade to Windows Vista Home Premium - shipped to you
for FREE (LOL). Cost? After rebates... $499.99.

Anyway... this looks like a pretty kickin' setup for the money. The model's
a T6540... you can check out the specs on the eMachines site. 16x Dual layer
DVD/RW, media reader, NVidia GeForce 6150LE w/ up to 128MB shared video ram
(PCI slot available for upgrades), 5.1 audio (sorry, doesn't ID the vendor).

Point being... doesn't look like Vista Home Premium is going to have a major
impact on system pricing. Don't have a clue what the deal with Ultimate will
be... can only assume the HW vendors have some agreement with MS to only
offer Ultimate on higher end boxes, even if it will run on boxes from the
shallow end of the gene pool.

Yeah, I'd upgrade this box to at least a gig of RAM, but, hey, this looks
like pretty good pricing to me. Remains to be seen what kind of deals will
get us Ultimate...

Lang

P.S. Oh yeah, wishing the best of the new year to all, especially CH and CB.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

The price is sure right!

And a Happy New Year to you too.

 

[Chad Harris]

Have a great year Lang. I would like to see some context on emachines from
this group because I don't really understand the comparison between them and
other pcs. I know they tend to be much cheaper.

CH

 

[Lang Murphy]

Ron,

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not considering purchasing this PC... (although
were I in the market for a new PC, I would seriously consider it) my point
was that the pricing did not seem to be much different for Vista Home
Premium than for XP.

Lang

 

[Lang Murphy]

Chad,

I have an eMachines T3062 which has an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ 2.2Ghz (I think)
CPU. Came with 512MB RAM and a 160GB HD, DVD/RW, media reader, on-board
video and sound. I got it on sale, hmm, 12-18 months ago, for $400. $50 for
another 512MB RAM, $50 for a 200GB HD and for $500 got a pretty kicking box
for the bucks. Need to get a new graphics card to support Pixel 2 shading
but at least this box has a PCI slot available to do that. Comparable Dells
of the time did not have any option for upgrading onboard video.

The main point of my post was that this seems to be pretty good pricing for
a PC with Vista Home Premium. With VHP having a SRP of $239, if i were on
the cusp of getting a new PC, and Home Premium met my requirements, I'd
weigh buying a new PC to get the OS as opposed to purchasing either the full
or upgrade packages.

I've not had, knock on wood, any problems with my eMachines box. Very
pleased with the price/performance ratio.

Lang

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

I getting the impression that it costs about the same cost to upgrade a two
or three year-old machine to Vista Premium standards and then buy Vista Home
Premium as it does to buy a new machine with VHP. It looks like the cost of
migrating to Vista is comparable to what I had to shell out for a machine
that ran XP properly when XP came out in 2001. Folks seem to think it takes
all the hardware bells and whistles to run Vista comfortably when all it
seems to need is just a current machine.

 

[Frazer Jolly Goodfellow]

Interesting ad in this week's CompUSA Sunday flyer. Front page.

An eMachines MCE PC with an Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 3800+, 512MB
RAM, 200GB hd, 15" LCD ($20 to upgrade to 17"... seems like a
well spent $20...) with a FREE (LOL) Express upgrade to Windows
Vista Home Premium - shipped to you for FREE (LOL). Cost? After
rebates... $499.99.

Anyway... this looks like a pretty kickin' setup for the money.
The model's a T6540... you can check out the specs on the
eMachines site. 16x Dual layer DVD/RW, media reader, NVidia
GeForce 6150LE w/ up to 128MB shared video ram (PCI slot
available for upgrades), 5.1 audio (sorry, doesn't ID the
vendor).

It's being offered with a Vista Home Premium upgrade when the basic
hardware spec, taking into account the shared video RAM, doesn't
even rate as being Vista Capable, let alone Vista Premium Ready.
<http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/capable.mspx>

Caveat Emptor.

Point being... doesn't look like Vista Home Premium is going to
have a major impact on system pricing. Don't have a clue what
the deal with Ultimate will be... can only assume the HW vendors
have some agreement with MS to only offer Ultimate on higher end
boxes, even if it will run on boxes from the shallow end of the
gene pool.

Yeah, I'd upgrade this box to at least a gig of RAM,

Indeed. Did the flyer specify Vista Capable or Vista Premium Ready
or whatever?

... but, hey, this looks like pretty good pricing to me. Remains

to be seen what kind of deals will get us Ultimate...
The pricing does look good, especially compared to here in the UK
(sigh).

 

[Lang Murphy]

Oh, agreed. Again... my main point was that it didn't look like Vista was
going to push the cost of a new PC through the roof, not that I thought this
was the PC to buy.

Lang