LGR - Restoring a 1998 Packard Bell Multimedia PC
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
Michael
OMG! I had one of these. I bought it open box from Best Buy for $200 and used it for a few years. I was in college at the time and purchased it on my debit card. Later that night I was out with a girl at a restaurant and my debit card got denied. It was because this Packard Bell put me over my daily spending limit! I had no idea at the time I even had a daily spending limit and felt so embarrassed. Ha! F&$#-ing Packard Bell! To this day, whenever I buy something a expensive with a debit card, I think about this Packard Bell. Ha! :)
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OMG! I had one of these. I bought it open box from Best Buy for $200 and used it for a few years. I was in college at the time and purchased it on my debit card. Later that night I was out with a girl at a restaurant and my debit card got denied. It was because this Packard Bell put me over my daily spending limit! I had no idea at the time I even had a daily spending limit and felt so embarrassed. Ha! F&$#-ing Packard Bell! To this day, whenever I buy something a expensive with a debit card, I think about this Packard Bell. Ha! :)
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R3d46
My first computer in 99 from packard bell came exactly in the same case. I still remember the specs to this day: Pentium II Celeron 400mhz, 32mb of ram, Integrated creative sound blaster AWE 64 and integrated ATI Mach64 chipset with 8mb video ram (which was actually taken from the 32mb system ram) and a 4. 2gb hard drive.
It couldn't even play quake 2 smoothly with hardware acceleration turned on, I had to upgrade the ram to 64mb before I could do that. It was a piece of crap but damn, I loved it.
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My first computer in 99 from packard bell came exactly in the same case. I still remember the specs to this day: Pentium II Celeron 400mhz, 32mb of ram, Integrated creative sound blaster AWE 64 and integrated ATI Mach64 chipset with 8mb video ram (which was actually taken from the 32mb system ram) and a 4. 2gb hard drive.
It couldn't even play quake 2 smoothly with hardware acceleration turned on, I had to upgrade the ram to 64mb before I could do that. It was a piece of crap but damn, I loved it.
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Uthman
Iknew a lot of people with one of these Packard Bell computers. They managed to get use out of it for things like doing school work and some gaming. I kind of wanted one of these too, then again this was before I got a computer in our house. Then Years later I would learn about how awful these were. I mean Packard Bell were caught using reused parts in their new computers, without disclosing that fact to the consumer. I hear Packard Bell is still a thing in Europe for some reason.
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Iknew a lot of people with one of these Packard Bell computers. They managed to get use out of it for things like doing school work and some gaming. I kind of wanted one of these too, then again this was before I got a computer in our house. Then Years later I would learn about how awful these were. I mean Packard Bell were caught using reused parts in their new computers, without disclosing that fact to the consumer. I hear Packard Bell is still a thing in Europe for some reason.
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Scott
And now we have machines (like mine for example ) with 24+Gigabytes of RAM and huge hard drives. I have a total hard drive storage capacity of 24TB. 10TB on board and 14 TB external. Gotta have it for large audio and video files being that I compose music for film and TV. I record audio at 96khz at 24 bit resolution then of course dither down to 16 bit but if I am recording upwards of 12 tracks in a multi track session, it adds up fast esp at that sampling rate and resolution!
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And now we have machines (like mine for example ) with 24+Gigabytes of RAM and huge hard drives. I have a total hard drive storage capacity of 24TB. 10TB on board and 14 TB external. Gotta have it for large audio and video files being that I compose music for film and TV. I record audio at 96khz at 24 bit resolution then of course dither down to 16 bit but if I am recording upwards of 12 tracks in a multi track session, it adds up fast esp at that sampling rate and resolution!
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Sean
My first windows computer was a Packard Bell I bought from Wal-Mart in 1995. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world, probably since I was upgrading from a Tandy 1000HX. Looking back though. It was very cheaply made, massive bloatware. even for Windows 3. 11. Me and my college roommate tried to upgrade it for WIn95 and couldn't because it only had 4 MB of RAM. I did learn how to upgrade ram and install a 56K internal modem, so it wasn't half bad.
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My first windows computer was a Packard Bell I bought from Wal-Mart in 1995. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world, probably since I was upgrading from a Tandy 1000HX. Looking back though. It was very cheaply made, massive bloatware. even for Windows 3. 11. Me and my college roommate tried to upgrade it for WIn95 and couldn't because it only had 4 MB of RAM. I did learn how to upgrade ram and install a 56K internal modem, so it wasn't half bad.
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TH3C001
Where do you (or can you) get new IDE drives nowadays anyway? Because I don't really have systems I want to save, but I do have some copies of Windows 95 and 98 and some older boards that might work and I just like to tinker around with computers in my spare time so, you know, I wouldn't mind getting a couple of drives to see what I can do. Or, I could go the druaga1 method and try to put everything on SSDS, that might be fun too.
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Where do you (or can you) get new IDE drives nowadays anyway? Because I don't really have systems I want to save, but I do have some copies of Windows 95 and 98 and some older boards that might work and I just like to tinker around with computers in my spare time so, you know, I wouldn't mind getting a couple of drives to see what I can do. Or, I could go the druaga1 method and try to put everything on SSDS, that might be fun too.
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fattomandeibu
Had a system very similar(mine was an Pentium 3 with 98SE) to this when I replaced my Amiga 1200 when I was about 15-16 that I used for years. It was amazingly good for a pre-made thing, never had any problems, but due to budget, I was only really running emulators(including like. 80% speed N64) due to budget reasons, but yeah. At this point, it seems Packard Bell machines were actually pretty solid.
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Had a system very similar(mine was an Pentium 3 with 98SE) to this when I replaced my Amiga 1200 when I was about 15-16 that I used for years. It was amazingly good for a pre-made thing, never had any problems, but due to budget, I was only really running emulators(including like. 80% speed N64) due to budget reasons, but yeah. At this point, it seems Packard Bell machines were actually pretty solid.
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Ren-
This was my first PC, and at the final stage of it's life it was also missing the eject floppy button. Had this machine with the M5SIB motherboard and a very slow Cyrix MII-300. I swapped it for AMD K6 and overclocked to 400 MHz, adding 2 Voodoo cards on the way. People nowadays often don't believe me when I tell them you could fit 3 different brands of CPU on this board.
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This was my first PC, and at the final stage of it's life it was also missing the eject floppy button. Had this machine with the M5SIB motherboard and a very slow Cyrix MII-300. I swapped it for AMD K6 and overclocked to 400 MHz, adding 2 Voodoo cards on the way. People nowadays often don't believe me when I tell them you could fit 3 different brands of CPU on this board.
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Michael
I got my first computer of IBM Aptiva 2156 with same CPU of K6-2 333MHz in a much smaller case. This seemed to be a popular configuration at late 1990s for entry-level -multi-media- PC. It is really painful for gaming on this machine with only SiS 5598 integrated graphic chip and there is almost no way to upgrade with Super7 socket and no AGP slot on.
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I got my first computer of IBM Aptiva 2156 with same CPU of K6-2 333MHz in a much smaller case. This seemed to be a popular configuration at late 1990s for entry-level -multi-media- PC. It is really painful for gaming on this machine with only SiS 5598 integrated graphic chip and there is almost no way to upgrade with Super7 socket and no AGP slot on.
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Chris
ewwwwww, a Packard Hell! Burn it! Funny story, worked at a computer store in the 90's in Charlottesville, VA. We had a Packard Bell monitor come in for repair, was under warranty so we sent it to them for replacement. The one that came back looked like they rolled it in the parking lot in the rain. Scratches, muddy dirt residue all over it. Ridiculous.
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ewwwwww, a Packard Hell! Burn it! Funny story, worked at a computer store in the 90's in Charlottesville, VA. We had a Packard Bell monitor come in for repair, was under warranty so we sent it to them for replacement. The one that came back looked like they rolled it in the parking lot in the rain. Scratches, muddy dirt residue all over it. Ridiculous.
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