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Thursday October 30, 2008
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 The eMachines eMD620-5777 will be sold at Best Buy beginning November 1 for a netbook-level price of $429.99. For someone who wants to step up from a netbook's small display to a 14.1-inch widescreen, the new (rebadged?) eMachines laptop might be the way to go.
But here are two things to give you pause: 1 gigabyte of RAM, and Vista Basic. Couple that with the integrated ATI Radeon X1200, which will share said memory, slowing it down further, and you have a recipe for what could be a seriously slow machine. There's no mention of Windows XP in the press release; you might be able to downgrade it to the older operating system, but I'm not sure.
The eMD620-5777 is powered by a an AMD Athlon 2650e, which is actually a new, power-efficient processor, and will bump up battery life a bit. A DVD+/- drive is included, together with a pair of USB ports and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi.
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November 11, 2008 4:50 AM
just bought this laptop at best buy for 299.00 and have to say that unless your a gamer or like to run multiple pages/programs at a time this is a good machine. I will use it primarily to do school work, (comes with msft works), check e-mail, watch movies on the road,(I have two kids), and for an alternative access to the internet. (family of 4 internet users that previously had to time share one pc.) this machine is plenty fast for the casual user and the ram can be upgraded for the more serious user. If I have any problems I will be sure to update this post. otherwise, so far I say buy this machiine it is well worth what I paid.
November 13, 2008 10:54 PM
I also just bought one at Best Buy for $299. How can you go wrong at this price? The screen is a bit washy at the odd angle, but it's sharp, plenty fast enough for web use and watching a DVD on the go. A big enough hard drive, and enough memory for all but the most demanding applications. The only thing that I dislike about it so far is Vista. I Just don't care for the interface, but maybe it will grow on me. If not, and I read the EULA correctly, I can legally "downgrade" it to any of the XP versions, so no big deal.
$299 for a machine with tons more capability and power than similarly priced netbooks? It's a winner in my book.
December 7, 2008 4:33 AM
I bought 2 of these for my sons at the best buy price of $299. I took the 1 gig from one and added it to the other notebook, and then pick up 2 ddr2-800 2gig sticks from Newegg for a great price. Wireless works great, DVDs look good, I have never used Vista, but with 2 gigs and 4 gigs, I don't notice any issues (Except for the constant nagging every time you try to run a program, but that is software related, not hardware). Not that I know what it really means, but the Vista score is 3.0 on both due to the on board graphics. Not for serious gamers, but I loaded LOTR Battle for Middle earth, and it runs great.