I’m the go to guy for my friends and family when it comes time to buy a new computer. They always want to know what sort to of PC they should buy. For the most part my family doesn’t play games and don’t need the quad-core, SLI running beasts that I am fond of. What dear old mom and dad need is a simple system that will surf the net and can be bought cheap.

The name eMachines is pretty much synonymous with cheap computers today and it announced a pair of new and low cost machines that would do mom and dad proud. The first new machine is the eMachines T3646 and the rig can be had for only $299.99 without a display. At that price you won’t get high-end components. The machine runs on an AMD Sempron LE-1250 CPU, sports 1GB of RAM and has a 160GB hard drive. The OS is Windows Vista Home Basic.

If you can’t stand to inflict Vista with 1GB of RAM on friends or family you can recommend the $399.99 T5254 that packs in an AMD Athlon dual-core processor, 2GB of RAM, a 320GB HDD and Windows Vista Home Premium. Graphics for both machines are via NVIDIA GeForce 6100 integrated and both feature a DVD burner as well. Neither rig is going to break any benchmark records, but if your mom is like mine and her last computer was running Windows 95 she will think these are the fastest computers ever.

eMachines