I agree it's still a great buy, John.
The restore disks on the Emachine are pretty good, but the OS is included on them. Given my preference, I prefer to have the full version of the OS on a separate, licensed disk, and the drivers and other programs on a different disk so I can upgrade from it later on. That OS alone, though, would be worth more than the cost of the machine in this instance. Again, for the price. . . it's great!
I think you misunderstood me on the spyware stuff. It is the Best Buy stuff, not Emachines, that I object to. They tie you right into their sales programs and most programs like AdAware treat them as the spyware they act like and will give you the option of nuking them.
Hope you are right on the 1 year warranty on the Emachines. I remember thinking it was a really, really short warranty when I purchased the one I have. For some reason, I usually lose the sound and have to do replacements after upgrades and new drivers fail. I figured the cost of the warranty from Best Buy, where they take care of it in your home or in the store, was worth it. Other people may feel differently.
I don't bother with warranties on ones I'm going to swap out and enhance on my own. However, where as with this Emachine, I will end up leaving it as is, I use the warranty.
I haven't used anything less than 512 in well over a year now. The machine I have set up for the forums has 1 gb rather than 512, and has four 120 gb harddrives set up with RAID and mirroring. It's just another personal preference to upgrade the memory, and it may not be necessary depending on what you load your machine with and what you use it for.