Another budget eMachines system is designed to be an internet machine. This one is running the famous Windows ME(me)
This copy of the recovery program is modified to work on any system or virtual machine, here I have decided to try out Vmware Fusion on macOS since it is one of the few VM’s to support addons/acceleration for Windows ME (Parallels only has graphics support, no sound or mouse acceleration)
Also for some reason VMware Fusion has no screenshot feature? Instead you have to use the macOS Screenshot utility instead.
As with other machine utilities looked at in the past, recovery is pretty straightforward forward where Ghost is used to restore the recovery image. And as with using these images with VMWare there is an awful amount of New Hardware dialog boxes to get through, most of which are for the PCI to PCI Bridge.
eMachines branding on the boot screen
iChoose – Not sure what this is but from the about screen it looks to be a shopping assistant where it notifies you of any savings or if a product is available cheaper elsewhere, whilst datamining you in the background. Cortana on Microsoft Edge did this a few years back, before Microsoft yeeted it due to GDPR
StarOffice is the Office suite included, featuring a word processor, presentation/PowerPoint and spreadsheet software. This was developed by Sun Microsystems and would eventually become OpenOffice, which would influence to LibreOffice, and then Apache OpenOffice.
It will try to use its own file format (.sdw for Writer), but is capable of opening HTML, Microsoft Word (doc) files and even WordPerfect (W4W) documents
Since there is not much difference here that we’ve not seen in other eMachine installs, lets try and upgrade to Windows XP.
Running the compatibility report advisor, the Keyboard hotkey driver and the iChoose alert applications appear to have issues and will need to be updated.
Starting the upgrade, things went a bit pear-shaped when he VM window appeared to have closed, in reality it resized itself to 1×1 pixels which was odd. I thought the VM had crashed until I heard the ME shutdown sound after about 2 minutes and then it rebooted into setup.
Soon after we are rewarded with the Windows desktop, along with the lovely eWare toolbar.
At this point I discovered save.com, which looks to be a voucher/coupon application that requires both a printer and an internet connection. Guess I must have missed this earlier.
Apart from the issues mentioned in the compatibility advisor, no further issues were found.
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