Packard Bell

whitetrash

Do they still suck?

I bought my first desktop with them and can't tell you the amount of problems with it, but now I'm looking for a decent laptop and they seem to have good specs for a resonable price.

I still don't quite trust 'em tho. Can anyone give me any advice?

Saruman

Most people here probably know better (from ewxperience) to avoid them so cant say if they are still crap.

Try google, might find reviews there.

Creamy Goodness

i once had a pakard bell and when i bought it, it spent more time in pcworld than it did on my desk!

sceptre

My brother has one and is generally pleased with it. Nice and light too. Mind you, he's not exactly the heaviest user in the world - I suspect he mostly uses Word and Windowsupdate on it (sorry Steve but you do!:D). Seems grand though - if he had any major problems with it I'd probably hear about it post haste.

sunbeam

Packard Bell don't exist in their own right any more, but are a brand name of NEC's

Two week ago my Easy Silver One 2800 notebook bought in Dixons [I know, I KNOW ] in December 2001 suffered hard disk failure. Unfortunately it did not come with proper recovery cds, just a floppy and backup partition on the hard drive and did not have an internal CDRW. Supposedly there was software available on the support site for creating backup disks from the partition with an external drive, but I couldn't find it. All I can say is thank goodness for Knoppix!

As it was out of warranty and I have a thesis due very soon I had little choice but to buy a new one (a Dell Inspiron 5100).

I had actually tried to buy one of those infamous extended warranties before I knew about the horrors of Mastercare. I gave up when after four attempts they never took the fee out of my account. The store manager couldn't even get through to them on the phone so I shudder to think how long I'd have been waiting to get it fixed anyway.

Apart from that the main problems with that model were overheating and atrocious battery life. From the support forums the latter seems to be a frequent occurrence with PB laptops, though I've no experience with the newer models. I certainly wouldn't buy one again though.

aidan_dunne

Yeah, PB's are really crap alright. And the desktops seem to go through power supplies like they're going out of fashion. I've had to replace the power supplies in several PB's and, because they use a lot of proprietry components like Dells, replacing large hardware bits in them is a major problem. In most cases, in order to get the power supplies (standard, off-the-shelf jobbies because I either couldn't get one from PB themselves, a similar one or, in most cases, because the owner wanted it done in a hurry) to fit in the cases I've had to mount them in the case upside-down or sideways. Not good practice, I know, but when someone is screaming at you to do the job as quickly as possible what are you gonna do?

In my opinion, stay well clear of PB's.

PiE

Strange... I bought a PB Celeron333 about 4 years ago and it's still going strong. Kept me online when all other systems failed tbh :]

sci0x

They are after improving now though with their EasyNote E5 with Intel Centrino Technology.