Is this eMachine suffering from early-stage capacitor leakage? Because it IS from the capacitor plague era, although it was made pretty late into the capacitor plague,

@me possibly but idk, is it malfunctioning or showing swollen caps or something

@wyatt I’ve looked inside this thing, and the caps looked a bit iffy (at least to me they looked iffy). Also, sometimes, this thing doesn’t POST (as in the thing doesn’t show the hardware test screen and the fans stay at max speed perpetually) and I have to shut it off and turn it back on to get it to POST again. I don’t know if that’s indicative of capacitor issues, though.

@me that could be caps yeah.
if it uses a normal ATX power supply you could try changing out the power supply for another one and see if it starts up more reliably. PSU's output a "power good" signal (PWR_OK) that can prevent startup sometimes if it's not getting asserted consistently or is taking too long to assert.

i have an oscilloscope i need to recap that also does this but i'm not 100% certain it's because of caps. It's certainly a likely culprit though.

It could also be motherboard caps or something. Possibly both.

@me (my oscilloscope also needs a second power-up to work, and contains an 8085 cpu inside)

@me do try to verify that it's actually a standard ATX supply if you have the means to or can find that info online, sometimes evil vendors would make PSU's with the same connectors but different wiring. I kind of doubt emachines was still doing that at that point but if you can find that info online it'd be wise to check