My college roommate had one of those. He kept the sticker on it because it was pretty clearly obsolete when it was new.
In its dank carcass resided dark spirits. And we referred to it as THE E-machine in tones usually reserved for the eldrich places where the polite rused to tread.
Also there was lots of porn on there, and noone seemed to know where it was coming from.
Never obsolete. Unless you are an MCI/UUNET⢠customer.
A friend of mineâs father is some sort of cryo scientist. He swears by BBC model Bâs for measuring his experiments. Never discount ancient hardware (if anyone has an Archimedes and/or an A4000 taking up space, they have a home hereâŚ).
Upgrading to the newest machine every 2 years for $99 sounds pretty awesome.
The fine print:
Special eMachines⢠Upgrade for $99 to eMachinesâ˘Network Members Only
Subscribe to the eMachines⢠Network for 24 consecutive months and weâll upgrade your eMachines⢠for only $99 (plus shipping)!
Hereâs how it works: If you live in the contiguous U.S. or Canada, weâll contact you after youâve 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, letâs 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. Weâll 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. Weâll promptly upgrade it and return it. Note: youâll have to back-up your data to avoid accidental loss, and use the original packaging (we have replacement packaging available).
See more detailed information
A friend has an old pick-and-place that runs off OS/2 Warp!!! He updates the parts database with a 5.25" floppy!
There are still functional 5.25" floppy drives? Hell, there are still functional 5.25" floppies? Those havenât been made for like 20 years, and they do wear out.
I mean even my 3.5" 1.44MiB floppies would die in a few months. What makes the 5.25" floppies last so long?
I have no idea but Iâll ask him next time I see him. He keeps the db on the hard drive so the floppies donât get used every day. But i/o to the hd is not network; itâs sneakernet. Maybe he has a secret stash of blank media.
How else are you going to read your floppies?
I donât know, but I wouldnât be so sure. Donât forget that they werenât only used in conventional PCs. Some devices like scientific instruments have much longer lives.
If you donât use them all the time and protect them from heat and moisture, theyâll probably last a while.
Windows CE, ME, NT.
Well, it could run Arch Linux, in theoryâŚ
Not quite sure, the processor (Looks like http://ark.intel.com/products/27190/Intel-Celeron-Processor-566-MHz-128K-Cache-66-MHz-FSB) requires the CMOV instruction in order to be a 686 class processor as required by Arch Linux, otherwise it would be a 586 which would require a 386 distribution, but still, there are plenty of those, like Debian or the BSDs.
CMOV was introduced with the Pentium Pro architecture, but to be completely sure if it is supported, I would rely on checking the CPUID of the processor itself. 
Also, recently a secondary restriction/requirement even for a 686 distribution, is to support SSE2 instructions, due that many third party or binary blob closed source components require that instruction set. In this case, it definitely doesnât support SSE2. 
I had that hobby of taking olds machines and put those to run with a Unix distro just for fun, usually NetBSD for somewhat old machines (486 with 66Mhz and 8MB RAM), which were kind of the first I had ever used, never went to anything older than a 486. I even went to eBay to get the maximum amount of RAM for a specific motherboard, sometimes it was just 4 sticks of 1MB.
This e-machine would run any legacy Unix very happy, just add an Ethernet adapter and you would have a nice little server for telnet access or static web pages.
486!? Luxury!!
But really I didnât know about that instruction. I have fond memories of building quite old machines, when you had to get drivers either from friends or USPS.
How long til the cost of its power consumption outstrips the hardware cost savings vs. buying something newer, equally capable, and more efficient?
The 5.25" floppies for my Apple ][c still work - I still pull it out sometimes (once a year) to show the kids stuff. They think itâs cool.
I have some 3.5" floppies too (mac and pc) but I never have need to use them since everything on them got migrated to a hard drive or cdrom.
About that e-machine, though, am I the only one that pulls the stickers off a computer as soon as I have it?
Still though, I distinctly remember back in elementary and middle school we used 3.5" floppies and theyâd go bad in a matter of weeks or months. Maybe the school was in a weird magnetic vortex, maybe we only got the cheapest crappiest floppies.
Iâm leaning towards magnetic vortex, since a few years later my thumbdrives went bad at about the same rate as the floppies in that building.
