I find the Woot description of this item particularly enjoyable. It reminds me of a class in college where each day my professor brought his desktop to class with him. To say he was an odd man was an understatement.
Slightly more on topic: This model has proven great for my mother, who does nothing terribly challenging on it.
One of the pictures show 1 x16 slot and 2 x1 slot plus a pci slot.
It’s worth noting that the standard Athlon II X2 250 runs at something like 3GHz;
This 250u variant runs at 1.6GHz. It has a 25w TDP, which is very low. This is meant to be a quiet and low-power machine. The processor does not have much oomph. It’s meant to be quiet and not suck down a lot of power.
I bet this entire system only uses 150W tops.
Here’s a link to details about the CPU: http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K10/AMD-Athlon%20II%20X2%20250u%20AD250USCK23GQ.html
The Secret Insides of the machine
I’d link the user guide but honestly it was about as useful as a box of foam rubber hammers, no details about the machine.
Let me cover all of the complaints now…
Yes Tiny power supply.
Yes emachine
Yes Gateway
blah blah blah…
Its not going to be a super computer, but it is a reasonable computer for the price. WalMart exclusive item, so check there for rants and raves.
From the reviews it seems that Emachines (atleast this one) may be better than those back “in the day” Seems like a good price or what you are getting.
If these have the original factory image, they’ll come with a bunch of crap installed:
eMachines Identity Card
eMachines Games
eMachines Recovery Management
eMachines Updater
Adobe® Flash® Player
Adobe® Reader®
CyberLink® PowerDVD™
Google Toolbar™
Microsoft® Office Home and Student 2007 (Trial)
Microsoft® Works
Nero® 9 Essentials
Norton Internet Security™ 2009 Trial 5
You can get rid of all of it if you like, but Adobe Reader and Flash Player are necessary for most people. I’m meh on the Google Toolbar. Everything else is trialware, bloat, or crap.
Judging by the available information, this machine will serve decently at Internet browsing and word processing, but anything beyond that is asking for too much.
The CPU is too weak, and the onboard video GPU is woefully outdated. The system at least includes adequate amount of RAM for what the system is capable of overall.
As for gaming, it should be able to handle most games that came out prior to 2003.
As for expandability, it does have a single PCI-E slot available, which should be prioritized for a discrete video card.
Some people might be able to use this as HTPC with few modifications, but expect it to be running hot, especially if you want to stick a Blu-ray drive in there. For that I highly recommend installing a discrete video card.
All in all, this is a good computer to give to people who won’t be getting or demanding much use out of their machines, like kids and older folks who aren’t going to do any serious number crunching with it any time soon.
Is this thing faster than saaay, an Atom netbook?
Would this be a good candidate for a new Windows Home Server??
And so would a single-core Celeron at this clock speed, but this machine is a LOT more capable. Don’t sell it short.
PC Decrapifier This is an AMAZING program for brand new bloatware laden machines. It is FREE for home users, thou a donation would be nice. It knows most of the bloatware out there, and you can check Google for other programs and files to see if you want to keep them. It runs all the uninstalls for you and does its best to get rid of the bloat!
I’m a computer geek, not a shill for PC Decrapifier. I’ve helped friends use it on their brand new machines and its a blessing.
It is definitely faster than an Atom netbook.
For more info in terms of performance: benchmark here.
You can probably put in 4 hard drives if you wanted to (not that you want to, hard drive will heat up beyond the comfort zone if you do). Should be a good fit for WHS.
I wish Woot! could figure out how Newegg does the zoom in thing with their pics. I can almost make out the model number on the motherboard. Then I could use my awesome google skills and try to find more details…
Looks like a total of 4 sata ports 2 filled
and it looks like the hard drive is mounted in “sideways” with the power and drive connector facing the side instead of the back of the case. Which makes me wonder how you get screws on both sides to secure more drives in place. No one likes taking the front side off of a case. It looks like there might be a screw at the top of the hard drive cage so that might be how. I am much more interested now in how the hard drive operates, with no power connected to it. Perpetual motion maybe?
Then the question is how much space between the back of the drive and the side of the case. You’d think it doesn’t matter, but some power supplies have “flush mount” power connectors and some stick out.
I have had decent luck with eMachines in the past. They usually make it through 3 years of hard daily usage before the motherboard craps out.
For anyone getting a new pc I highly suggest http://ninite.com/
This is a one stop shop for all those pesky apps you need to download. Just check off what you need and hit download and done. No going from one site to another.
I don’t know about Home Server, but just about anything is better than a netbook. This blows a netbook out of the water, twice.
however you need a REALLY big bag to carry this in to make it netbook portable 
Question to the masses:
I only see VGA on the description. If I wanted to run this to, say, a 1080p 50" plasma, is this a possible machine for me? (Want to run hulu, bluray ‘backups’ etc.) I’ve been waiting patiently for woot to post a sub 300$ HDMI desktop.
Without some nonsense like this:
This would definitely be faster than a netbook since its a dual core versus a single core, has almost 4 times the cache as a netbook and has more than double the bus speed.
As far as whether it would be a good server…I would say probably no as you should look for at least a dual core with 2.5-3.0 GHz
If you purchased a PCIe graphics card that had HDMI on it, it could. But then you’d need to buy that card and probably a larger power supply.
$10.00 more new at wally world if you add the 1 year warranty and you could have it now. If you don’t like it turn around and take it back.
so far the only desktop that i’ve owned (long term) that did not have some sort of hardware issues is my emachines.