Packard Hell!

That is what we used to call Packard Bell machines at the large computer retail store where I used to work when I was younger. And they have not gotten any better. Just last week I was working on a Packard Bell and was once again impressed by how cheap they are. The chassis that holds in the hard drive is bolted to the chassis that holds in the CD. In order to replace the cheap hard drive that had been destroyed by normal use one would have to take a drill and drill through that bolt, or slide the entire cd and hard drive assembly out. Sad, really.

And it's not just the Packard Bells people bring to me to fix that I get my information from, it's from owning a Packard Bell and having a sister who owns one. I bought a Packard Bell because they were practically GIVING it away. It was a Pentium 75 with 8 Megs of RAM, a CD and TONS of software which alone would have cost me more than the entire computer was costing me. So I figured even if the hardware was worthless the software made it a worthwhile purchase! I was wrong.

The first thing I did with my packard bell was remove that ridiculous Packard Bell Navigator. ICK! I wanted to play Duke Nukem 3d over the phone with a friend but his modem would not connect to my cheapo Packard Bell piece of junk modem. And believe me, with 3 years as a Systems operator of a bulletin board you learn a bit about modems, I know all the standard Hayes compatible AT commands there are, including how to tweak the handshake, enable MNP or v.42 bis... suffice to say I am an expert in modem init strings. So I went out and bought a $260 Motorola 28.8K Lifestyles modem... no problems there! That is if you don't count the fact that in order to install the modem I had to remove the old modem... but wait a minute.. what's this? The old modem is an intregral part of the SOUND CARD! The hell? Yes.. in order to cut costs Packard Bell puts in one cheapo sound/modem card instead of two decent individual cards. So I call up Packard Bell to have them tell me how exactly to disable the modem portion of the card (I did not feel like guessing) They had me on hold so long I decided I would just put the Lifestyles modem on a different com port and keep both modems.

In all fairness when I setup the Packard Hell on my home network it went smoothly, no problems there, I just slipped the Network card in, setup Windows 95's networking and I was on the network. It did, however, leave me with no open ISA slots, so if I wanted to add something later, like say a SCSI adapter to hook up a scanner or what have you, I would have been SOL.

Another major shortcoming is that it did not have any L2 cache! It had L1 Cache but I think if Packard Bell could cut a deal with Intel where they would make Pentium Chips with no L1 cache for less they would do it. After all what does the average customer know about the internal workings of a computer? The fact that it had no L2 cache tells me that Packard Bell is an evil computer company that only tries to make the numbers people are told to look for by the computer magazines look good. While hiding the substandard numbers behind them!

I swear, I was online (Using my Motorola Modem) and had just downloaded the Active Worlds browser, I started it up, saw it connect and waited while the computer loaded the landscape I was in. I waited as the hard drive kept working... still working.. boy it's been 5 minutes... hmmm well tehre's the grass.. ok we are getting there... hmm still swapping. It's not 30 minutes after I started the browser and all I can see so far are a few trees, the sky and some grass, the computer is still swapping to disk like mad... I cannot exit the browser because the computer is too busy trying to load this landscape. I left, made myself a sandwich, came back sometime later still nothing, not closing, still swapping. I washed my car and came back into the house.. still swapping, still can't do anything. I just shut off the computer and called it a day. I spent a total of 90 minutes waiting for that stupid computer to come back online. Now when I access Active Worlds using my custom built Pentium 166 with 64 Megs of EDO RAM and 512k Pipeline burst cache I do not have to wait for anything, in fact, now I am a little peeved at Active worlds for having suck slow walking avatars... Many times I have been walking down a street on there and wishing my character could move a bit faster.

Well since I had both modems active, I figured I would take advantage of Packard Bell's Faxworks software and setup a call box with fax on demand for my business. Shaka, when the walls fell. The Faxworks software was a real pain to use, I could not successfully configure it and it was making me angry, To top it off, after I had attempted to configure it and gave up, the computer stopped shutting off properly, it would sit there for a good three minutes then tell me the modem was in use, THEN it would shut down. As you can imagine this got quite annoying, so I called Packard Bell Technical support, and after what felt like half a day on hold, I finally got through, I was told to delete all the faxworks files and remove it from my win.ini files and reinstall faxworks, I did and they waited with me on the phone, then I attempted to configure it again with their help and got the same results as before. At this point they told me that the faxworks software is buggy and it does do that in some cases, and that there really wasn't anything that could be done, I would just not be able to use Faxworks on that computer. I couldn't believe it! They basically said "Sorry, our computers and the software we make for them are substandard, and you are going to have to live with it." Not this kid, I packed that Packard Bell back up in it's Box and took it back to the store that very same day. I taped a full page of complaints I had about the computer to the top of the box so as to make sure Packard Bell got the message.

If you have had a Packard Hell horror story, e-mail it to me, maybe I will start up a Packard Hell horror story page! :)