I bought an eMachines emd644 notebook to replace the MSI laptop that just died the start of the year. Price at just a bit more than 20,000php, it's the cheapest notebook (not netbook) I've bought over the past few years.
I didn't really review the specs when I ordered it. But to my surprise, it packs more than I expected. It has the now standard but hefty 2GB of RAM. It has a 500GB hard disk that tempted me to send my current laptop off to our personnel and upgrade to this one. It has bluetooth which I almost never use. And it has a Zacate dual-core processor running at not-so-fast 1.6ghz, but with a much better graphics core than my current AMD P320+HD4250. I didn't really expect to find the new AMD processors so soon especially when it was just shown in the CES exhibit earlier this month. All in all, it's still too powerful for a regular company sales agent, that I think I could have gotten a better deal if I found one with a smaller hard drive at the least.
To my chagrin, installation of Ubuntu 10.10 wasn't flawless at all. I had to do some voodoo to get the Broadcom wireless working. The Atheros wired ethernet is not working at all! And once I installed the AMD proprietary graphics driver, I got the annoying "Unsupported Hardware" overlay at the bottom right of the screen. Couldn't they have just made that overlay an option that could be easily switched off?
Well, besides those minor issues, I'm pretty happy with the new laptop. Of course, I'm not the one really using it. Linux still has a bit to catch up when it comes to outright support for the latest and greatest hardware. I've learned that over the past with missing out-of-the-box support for ATI HD4250, Intel's Core i3/5/7 and now with Zacate. But I've grown to the challenge and learned to work along with the problems.
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