Gateway’s First eMachines Lineup Includes $999 Widescreen Notebook

$399-After-Rebate Desktop Has DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo Drive

This week’s big news from Gateway is the closing of its red-ink-stained retail stores, but the next biggest news is a revised spring lineup of retail PCs — the first from the eMachines brand since the latter’s acquisition by Gateway last month.

The new eMachines desktops consist of two Intel Celeron-based systems with integrated graphics (and no AGP slot for later upgrades) and two AMD Athlon XP 3000+ models with Nvidia’s nForce2 chipset plus available AGP slots. The eMachines T2742 ($449 with $50 mail-in rebate) offers a 2.7GHz Celeron, 256MB of DDR, 40GB hard disk, and DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive, while the T2885 ($529 with $50 rebate) steps up to a Celeron/2.8, 512MB of memory, an 80GB hard disk, and separate CD-RW and DVD-ROM drives. The eMachines T3065 ($619 with $50 rebate) and T3085 ($669 with $50 rebate) each come with 512MB of DDR, a 160GB hard disk, and 8-in-1 media reader; the former has CD-RW and DVD-ROM drives while the latter has DVD±RW and CD-ROM.

The eMachines notebooks share a 7.5-pound chassis with 15.4-inch widescreen (1,280 by 800) display. The M2105 ($1,099 with $100 rebate) combines Celeron/2.8 power with a 40GB hard disk and DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive; the M6410 ($1,399 with $100 rebate) steps up to Intel’s Pentium 4/2.8 and a 60GB hard disk. If you crave 64-bit processing power, the eMachines M6805 ($1,499 with $100 rebate) has a mobile Athlon 64 3000+ CPU and combo drive, and the M6809 ($1,649 with $100 rebate) has a mobile Athlon 64 3200+ and DVD±RW drive. Each of the latter has ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics and 512MB of DDR333 memory, and the top three of the four portables have Broadcom’s 54g wireless networking chipset.