Customer Reviews

eMachines M6810 Laptop (2.00 GHz Athlon 64 3200+ Mobile, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD-RW Drive)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was looking to buy a Pentium 4 notebook with a large (15.4) LCD screen in "wxga" (widescreen) format, but when I found this one.... I think I don't need to keep looking any further.

eMachines was an independent company, now owned by Gateway. They always made great machines based on AMD processors, and this seems to be no exception.

The 64-bit Athlon64 cpu delivers roughly the same power as a 3.2 Ghz P4, and not only that, it can run today's 32-bit applications as well as tomorrow's Windows for AMD64 (currently in beta) and today's 64-bit SUSE Linux 9.1 (which includes a fully ported 64 bit kernel).

The video chipset is a "real" one, using dedicated video memory instead of "shared ram".

The screen seems lovely for DVD playback, and the HD space is enough even for splitting in two and installing XP + Linux in a dual-boot configuration.

Good-bye P4 notebooks...

My friend owns this notebook, but I have helped him set it up. He purchased it used through an auction site and ended up paying it the same price as other retailers.

The performance (AMD Athlon 64 at 2GHz, 512MB RAM)is quite nice, and is able to play some serious games due to the plentiful graphics chipset within. The speakers on the unit resembles the same placement as the Compaq/HP notebook variants, and the machine is quite nice to look at.

However, there are shortcomings. The LCD seems dull to look at, and after adjusting the color tones and brightness, it still looks dull. The notebook he had also had traces of cut hair on it, we joked at this, since our group never recommends purchasing items from the auction site (for such reason). The fan is noisy, but not too noisy. It makes a "unique" sound when the fan runs at full speed.

The machine is nice, but the screen (in his model) is dull in color, and if calibrated, not very bright at all.

If parent company Gateway stays afloat, eMachines can continue selling great value notebooks.

I've had my M6810 since August 2004 and it has been out for service twice. The first time was for a defect with the manufacturing of the housing, the flanges that hold the screen to the base cracked and broke. The second time, the monitor developed vertical colored lines due to another hardware problem. Both times, the tech support representatives were EXCELLENT. They fixed both problems quickly and with NO HASSLE at all. My computer is now having a problem with shutting down for no reason, I am attributing this to a thermal failure. But I expect their tech support to be just as helpful as they were before. The computer itself is a pleasure to use. I upgraded the operating system to XP professional and removed all of the extraneous programs that arent for a power user. But this computer runs stably.. if I could just keep the technical glitches from happening.. it would be a perfect computer.

I just returned my e-Machines M6810 notebook after discovering that the DVD drive was defective. The drive "glitches" and will not read a DVD smoothly. Apparently, this is a common problem, as one of the managers at Best Buy stated that they have been told to "expect" this problem and are now "redirecting" customers towards other notebooks (Problem DVD drives are apparently as frequent as one out of every 2-3 notebooks). This is unfortunate because this model (after reviewing and comparing other notebooks for days prior to making the purchase) truly does have some nice hardware on board (e.g. 64 bit processor, 512MB RAM, 64MB ATI 9600 dedicated videocard). Another problem I ran into with this laptop is in regards to its ethernet driver. Windows XP will not allow a simple "plug and play" internet connection as the required driver is not recognized. This problem was only adding insult to injury after seeing this machine play a DVD. Save some time and look elsewhere.

Why would you care about the drivers? Either download the newest realtek or via drivers from www.realtek.com or www.viaarena.com. Besides that, why would you want to use Windows with this machine - windows can't even do 64-bit until 2005...

Linux is known to work well with this laptop, with fewer security and driver issues.

Hasn't had any major gliches. The only problem is that it can't uninstall a few games that I want to get rid of. Other than that it faster than the speed of light with a cable modem.