Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This is a perfect little computer hookup to a TV to watch netflix/hulu/youtube. It has built in wireless and HDMI output. This gets rid of lot of wires that would need otherwise to hook up a computer to a TV. It comes with minimum bloatware. Its pretty quiet and requires very less space. Its a no brainer for people who needs a cheap media center PC.
The rest of the review is specially for those who are interested in the details of how this computer is best for media center.
I needed a PC to do following things.
1). Watch videos off of my network drive - WD world book.
2). Stream HD channels from my HDHomeRun box.
3). Record shows in HD to my network drive.
4). Download movies/videos off of internet in the background to my network drive.
5). Stream my Video library on the home network so that I can watch it on Xbox in other room.
I wanted a computer to do all of the above and my budget was $300. I also didnt want to wire my whole house in order to achieve this.
Not all of the above worked out of the box. I had to fine tune this bad boy to get the full juice out of it. Remember this computer has a single core and 2GB RAM to work with. However, NVIDIA 9200 comes in handy to do lot of video handling especially HD.
Tweaks in the order I did.
1). Get rid of bloatware including office works and other software trials.
2). Removed Norton Internet Security and installed the Norton Antivirus that Comcast gives away for free.
3). Disabled - Norton back up service, Identity protection service. These services eat lot of RAM and I can live without these protections. Also I wasn't gonna do anything related to money on this computer. So, do not care about these stuff.
4). Disabled Win 7 Aero Graphics by changing the theme to Windows classic. I dont need fancy animations for this computer to open a window.
5). Disabled lot of windows components such as Tablet services, assistance services - You can disable these things by going to ->Add Remove programs -> add remove windows components.
6). Install CopSSH, so that I can dial into this computer while I am away.
7). I had to upgrade all the drivers - sound, chipset, display from the emachines website because I had issues streaming HD content through Media Center. After that everything worked fine. I found that NVIDIA has a newer display driver on its website. Hence, I upgraded that too. After upgrading the display driver, the choppiness of video on went away.
8). With above tweaks, the PC uses little over 700MB after boot up. So I have about 1GB of Ram for actual media center activities. Around 256MB is unusable because its shared by NVIDIA.
After all these tweaks, I setup my Windows media center with my network drive and HDHomeRun. So now, I have a fully functional media center which allows me to watch movies/videos off of my Network drive and also watch/record local HD channels. I use bit torrent to download videos. I can also manage these downloads remotely by dialing into this computer through copssh. Everything for under $300. Couldn't ask for anything more.
Click Here to see more reviews about: eMachines ER1402-05 Desktop (Black)
eMachines ER1402: The Mini Home Entertainment Center
The redesigned eMachines ER1402-05 "mini-e" Desktop is an amazing slim and compact PC that provides full HD multimedia entertainment as well as everyday productivity. This uniquely configured mini PC looks great in your family room or can snap to the back of your monitor, streamlining your personal space while giving you a home infotainment center that lets you play games, surf the Web, view and edit photos, watch HD movies, and more.
This space-saving PC is the ideal entertainment solution for streaming movies, TV shows, music and other online media.
Click here for more information about eMachines ER1402-05 Desktop (Black)
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