For context, the emachines “never obsolete” wasn’t referring to this computer, it was a recycling program where you could send your old machine back and get a huge discount on your next one. It was actually a pretty good deal at the time, especially when your average family machine was a lot more expensive than they are today
There were a couple of companies that tried programs like this. PeoplePC was another similar program. You would pay for their services and they would lease you a computer every 3 years.
I wonder how much of a discount OP can get when they send their machine back?
If it’s in perfect condition, and they valued it based on second hand retrocomputing market prices… probably a nice chunk of cash.
These aren’t super valuable. You can get them for about 200-250 bucks.
pretty misleading tbh
Wow, that computer can run Windows 98? Here I am on Windows 11, not realizing that I’m 87 versions behind.
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And added the pipes screensaver
That’s going to be a long update.
F
You conveniently blocked the part of the sticker saying what they mean by “never obsolete” with the red circle. IIRC, they gave you a massive discount to trade in your computer every 2 years for the latest model, so you were always up to date. Kinda like phones now.
I guess it’s just a shit post idk
On lemmy?
Totally useless red circle too. I guess it was intentionally drawn to obscure the context
Still a total lie to say that this computer is never obsolete.
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That’s why we called them stiffy drives. It’s the 5.25inch disks that were floppy.
God,the number of these I sold at Best buy…rolling my eyes the entire time…and making absolutely sure the customer understood exactly what that phrase meant in this ultra-scammy context…
Ended up not being able to handle that job. Something about literally full-time debunking of lies printed on everything in sight was exhausting for me.
How were they trying to justify that statement?
I sold a bunch of them used… Lol…
They were basically obsolete the minute they were shipped to stores with the shitty Celeron CPUs, virtually no RAM, and tiny hard drives but people still bought them from me a year later for too much money.
Cmon that thing will run Linux like a champ!
if your distro of choice happens to be debian with openbox
That’ll make a great Hackintosh!
I’d bet Debian 12 installs like a champ.
The “never obsolete” refers to a subscription service, where they would periodically send you updates somehow. LGR has a good video on this.
Click here to download more RAM!!
Your link seems to be broken; I’ve clicked like 4375 times…
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Holy shit my grandfather had this exact PC up until ten years ago or so lol
Why’d he get rid of it? Obviously it wasn’t obsolete.
It obsoletely was
I wonder if it’s possible to get a bunch of these, daisy chain the processors, and span hard drives until it can install and run Monster Hunter World. Lack of VRAM is the only foreseeable issue.
You forgot cache distance. That would also critically hinder performance
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I realize the irony of me talking about latency as a concern given my absurd above suggestion, but I think the bus speed would slow dramatically if it only relied on regular RAM.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
Mod parent up.
Surely there would be enough latency to make it unplayable, no?
I doubt enough of these exist to make an adequate E-Machine supercomputer
Why mhw in particular?
The PC version has probably the worst optimization of any game I’ve ever played. It’s an incredibly lazy console port, framelocked and all.
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What’s the form factor? ATX?
Rip out the guts and slap in a Ryzen with some SSDs. Troll people by playing Farcry or something equally as demanding on it.
Sleeper builds like that are getting pretty popular actually.
A lot of prebuilts from that era made up their own case dimensions.
Add non standard power supply sizes to the list.
By the time they got rid of the AT form factor found around the pentium and early socket 7 era, motherboard sizes and screw hole placement started following the ATX specifications which meant standardization. Manufactures still sometimes did really dumb shit with case designs but they still do that today. For example I once saw this shitty compaq with the psu right over the cpu so you can’t fit a serious cooler. And those iconic Windows XP Dell Dimensions everyone had were only big enough to fit micro atx motherboards even though the case was basically mid tower sized. I can’t even remember how they made such inefficient use of the space but it involved lots of stupid brackets and screws in idiotic places.
At this point, Farcry probably released closer to that computer’s release than today…
If it can still play SimCopter, the I have to agree.
Did we just become best friends?
Whenever you turn it on the fan plays SimCopter whether you like it or not
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Actually they started fairly early, but it was more like a phase. Just like the Inter Net.
How many sales stickers can one machine have?
Manufacturer mandates a certain amount of flair.
no no no no, it’s not a mandate, it’s just that we encourage self expression here in the PC market. You do want to express yourself, right?
Someone remembers Office Space far better than I do! Lol
Don’t worry, you’re a real straight shooter with upper management written all over you.
37 pieces of flair to be exact.
It’s in the contract that technically 15 would suffice, but who wants to be the company that only does the bare minimum?
Damn son you got dem AGP graphics! At least that is 1 thing that can be upgraded.
Seems like about every pubic US university was selling those back in the late 90’s. So overpriced, even for the time!
pubic US university
Wonder what they teach there