eMachines ET1161-07

>> Justin: Hi, it's Justin Yu, Assistant Editor for CNET.com and this is the eMachines ET1161-07 Budget Desktop computer. Now it's one of 3 Best Buy systems recently released in the low-cost category and contains the usual fair of baseline components in a bare-bones tower. Now the chassis itself looks remarkably like the ET1161-03, you're basically in the same boring gray and black chassis with a dual layer burner on top and an expansion drive underneath. Now below that you'll find a digital media manager and a couple of USB 2.0 ports. Now the back is just as simple as the front with more USB ports and a collection of audio and peripheral jacks. Now we won't ding the eMachines for not including WiFi but we do hope to see more budget computer manufacturers start including wireless in these types of setups. We do give the eMachines a hand though for including plenty of room for inside expansion by way of an open 16X PCI express lot, 2 1X PCI eSlots and 1 available DIM slot for adding more memory later on down the line. Now you can also get 2 extra drives in the available SATA ports or even throw in a sound card if you remove the ancient 56K modem. Still not sure why companies are including dial-up modems with their systems, you know, just because you don't have a lot of money to spend on a computer doesn't mean you're living in the stone age. Anyway, taking a peek inside you'll see a decent spread of components including a 2.1 GH, AND Athlon Dual Core processor, 3 GB of RAM, an integrated graphics card, a 320 G hard drive and Ethernet LAN; that's not bad but the problem is that the competition offers more for less money. We compared it to other similarly priced systems and it dragged its feet in all of our benchmark tests. One reason for this is because most of the other systems run on 64 bit Windows and which paired with 4 GB of memory can help provide significantly speedier multi-tasking. Now for just $100.00 more we actually recommend another computer the ACER Aspire X1700, go check out that review and thanks for watching I'm Justin Yu and this is the eMachines ET1161-07 Desktop computer. ^E00:02:08