The eMachines T5254 ($400 street) is a budget-friendly PC that rivals the performance of the company’s recent top-of-the-line T5246, but costs $30 less. It also saves you money in the long run, because of to its low-power AMD Athlon X2 BE processor. The T5254 continues eMachines’ new (and most welcome) stance of offering budget Windows Vista PCs with 2GB of system memory. The T5254 is best suited as an extra PC for the home, or a good first PC for the kids.

Price-wise, the T5254 falls between the eMachines T3642 ($350) and T5246 ($430), but its dual-core AMD processor and extra gigabyte of memory make it a far better bargain than the T3642, with its single-core processor and 1GB of RAM. The increased RAM and extra processor core of the T5254 improve multitasking and really come in handy when the system is running processor-taxing multimedia apps. Considering that Vista Home Premium is bundled with the system, the more memory that’s included, the better.

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