E-Machines M5405 PC Notebook - Decent Machine If You Don't Mind Windows Vista

When my old laptop died , I was in a state. How would I ever keep up with writing? Oh no! Well, someone came to my rescue. Off to Best Buy we went. He played around on a few and let me browse and pick what I wanted. Brave man, that. Turns out the machine that had all the features I was looking for was actually one of the cheapest. Lucky man, that. I settled on the E-Machines M5405 PC Notebook.

The first thing I looked for was weight. I'm a wuss and take my laptop everywhere with me so it had to be light. This one fit the bill at a very nice 5.5 pounds. I can handle that. I've lugged it through a few airports now and am quite pleased with that aspect.

The second thing was I really kinda wanted a wide-screen monitor for watching DVDs. This one has a 15.4" wide-screen which works out just about right. It's not too big, yet big enough to comfortably watch my movies on without squinting. The WXGA colors are crisp with DVDs too. The only complaint I have in this area is the speakers. While they are clear enough, they are not loud enough. I'm ever so slightly hard of hearing in one ear and I have to set the unit on my lap half the time to hear the dialogue. I have gone in and put every sound aspect up to max, which helped a bit, but I still wish the speakers were a tad louder. On games they seem to put out more than enough sound though... I wonder why that is?

Another thing I liked about this one is the sturdiness of the case as well as the over-all looks. It's a very thin, sleek machine in black and brushed silver... almost a platinum look. Sexxxy. It doesn't feel fragile at all like some I've seen.

The processor is an AMD Sempron, which I am assuming is their answer to the Pentium M series. I'm not a techie and never claimed to be, this is just my guess. I do know it's the next generation up from the Athlons. It does come with an enhanced firewall which I have been very pleased with thus far. I have the wonderful joy of being targeted by a rather persistant and annoying hacker of late and this system catches him everytime. Score. It also lists increased network and memory protection which I really have no clue about, not being on a network right now.

The E-Machines M5405 PC Notebook comes with a built-in 802.11G wireless card with high-speed mode (pretty sure it's Linksys), which is supposedly 30% faster than a regular 802.11G. More geek talk, eh? I do know it screams, even from hotel connections which are usually slower than normal. It resolves faster than my old card did too. The range is approx. 300 feet and it has WEP (wired equivalency privacy encription). The one annoying thing on the wireless is that you have to turn it on (FN + F2) each time you boot up. I know I can reset that to automatically be on, but it's a safety feature for powering up in airports and what have you so I'll deal with that.

The battery life is advertised at 3 hours. So far that is holding true for Internet browsing, but not for graphic intensive games. Game playing garners me around 2 hours battery life. I know it'll decrease over time as they all do, but for now that is a pretty good amount of time.

Speaking of games, this is not a bad gaming machine at all. I mean it won't compete in the on-line FPS games like Doom 3 (or whatever the latest incarnation is) simply because the refresh rate does, in fact, suck. I don't know the exact number on that, but trust me... if it's shoot-em-ups you wish to play, go for a different machine. I don't play those as a rule so I'm not concerned with the slow refresh rate at all. The video card is very good with games I do like to play, such as Age of Empires 2 and Roller Coaster Tycoon 2. No problems running those types of games at all.

Let's see.. what have I missed here... The Processor Speed is 1.6 GHz and it has 512 MB RAM (shared, unfortunately). It has a sweet 60 GB of memory. As far as ports go, this one comes with 3 USB 2.0 ports, which really is quite enough for me. That lets me plug in a mouse with room to spare if I ever need to add a printer and scanner separately for some reason. The ports are in the back with the powercord thingy. Modem and ethernet jacks are on the left, along with headphone/microphone jacks.

The Primary Drive is a CD-RW/DVD Combo and is located on the right. Now, I would prefer this to be in the front actually, but I can deal. heh. Cables...cables.. the power cable is in two parts for some weird reason. Don't ask me.. very odd. It also came with a modem cable. Mouse sold separately. heh.

Ok. Why does she keep mentioning a mouse? Doesn't it have a touchpad? Well yeah it does, as much as that annoys me. See, these damn things are always situated right where my thumbs hit while I'm typing! Urgh. Luckily, I can easily disable the pad from windows rather than F8ing in start up mode and fiddling with that crap. Also, if I happen to forget to pack my mouse (did once already) I can easily get back into it and re-activate the pad through keyboard shortcuts. coooolness. This pad, for those who like them, also has nice little up/down thingies on the side of it for page scrolling.

As far as software goes, this comes loaded with Windows XP Home edition (although they are probably pushing the Vista now instead), Microsoft Money, Quicken, the usual games like Solitaire, SonicStage (no idea), a few DVD player programs... the usual suspects. One thing you might want to be aware of is that this also comes loaded with all kinds of irritating AOL crap. I searched and destroyed all that junk as soon as I took it out of the box. heh.

The keyboard itself is smaller than usual, but I like it. I have a much easier time typing on it than I do on the VAIO... as long as the pad is disabled. I do wish they would stop putting in certain shortcuts though on the keyboard.. things like what the hell IS that key that wipes out everything you've just typed? I mean, who's brilliant idea was that anyway? I think it was some sort of sick joke, personally, but it's on all the recent keyboards. Some day I'll hunt that joker programmer down, I swear...

At any rate, I have to really give this one a full 5 stars for what it is. I mean we paid a lowly $999 for it, which was relatively cheap compared to others with similar features. Yes you can get better machines than this, but not in this price range. The next one I saw that would interest me was the new little bitsy Sony VAIO but it didn't have a wide-screen and it was almost double in price.

So yes, I do recommend this one, in spite of the fact that the most evil Gateway people recently took over eMachines. Just get the extended Best Buy warranty and you won't have to mess with Gateway's horrible support people. That's what I did. heh. Although, since the roll-out of Windows Vista, this laptop is collecting dust due to me switching over to all Macs. I flat refuse to run a system that is nothing more than a giant piece of SpyWare.