My Packard Bell 286 worked fine from 1990 to 1995.

MS-DOS 4.00 to MS-DOS 6.22.

Solid as a rock.

Is your rant based on experience or from watching youtube videos?

Pictures of Navigator, pcworld.com and of course actual usage of a packard bell is my knowledge of it.

you will soon learn that most oem computers typically bundle with useless swag on it

try judging a computer after formatting it rather

In my experience, I've found Packard Bell machines, especially those sold through large retail chains in the 1990's, to be of poor construction. Their cases were almost always flimsy and their chosen components tended to be be of the cheaper varieties. They also happened to be a discreet nightmare to upgrade. These claims to just as easily be applied to Dell and Gateway machines of the same period too.

I've been upgrading an Advent PC (may be a uk brand i guess) recently - it was a PII 350, had a nice Gigabyte GA686BX board too. All that's left of the Advent is the case and floppy drive, mind you, and I guess the case may have to go if the new p4 system in it overheats. Only annoyance was the case not having separate side panels, and the only failure was the PSU (failed in 2006). Have kept the board - atx board, agp and 3 isa slots.

I'm probably going to be exchanging the p4 for a PII Packard Bell system in a few weeks time, sounds like that will be fun 😵 , but maybe it will help me see that some IT gear really can be thrown away 🤣 .

Packard Bell liked to skip L2 cache. That right there is one of the biggest reasons to dislike them. Sure there were plenty of other companies skipping it or faking it, and they too deserve equal disgust.

Dell, Micron and Gateway 2000 on the other hand usually gave you a mostly-decent rig. Good quality Intel OEM mobos, cache RAM, competitive hardware. There were others too of course, but those 3 were the big mail order PC companies of the '90s.

Their "Navigator" desktop was actually liked by some people, as I recall. Especially prior to Win95, I think. I think sometimes we extremely knowledgeable PC users forget just how clueless the majority of users actually are. Navigator made things much more apparent and simple for these people. Not that relying on this kind of super-limited proprietary UI is smart for anyone. It was easy though.

http://toastytech.com/guis/pbnav.html

I used to sell... and fix Packard Bell computers. They did indeed suck. Just because some people don't have problems doesn't mean they are good computers. It was always a lower class of hardware and compared to their Gateway/Dell/Ares/Zeos peers of the time, it always performed worse... sometimes much worse.

The fact some Packard Bell computers are still "alive" does not a quality PC make. 😀

I used to own a packard bell, it was a p133 with 16mb or ram. This was in 1996 or 97. Honestly, because it sucked to bad, I learned a whole great deal about computers in general (my first computer was a commodore64, but I mostly just did gaming and wrote simple BASIC programs). Since there was always some sort of workaround to get anything running on that computer, I learned a whole deal. I remember I voided the warranty because I wanted to put a 3dfx card, added more ram, upgraded the onboard cirrus logic video card to 2mb from initial 1mb. Also upgraded to Awe64 (mine had some aztech isa sound card with integrated modem, no direct x 5 support. I remember I had to use drivers for a totally different sound card to get it to work to play Curse of Monkey Island)

I honestly can't say that I hated it, because I've gone through many of my favorite games on that computer, c&c's, ff7, warcrafts, starcraft, homm, monkey islands, dooms, quake, duke3d, Diablo and the killer app: Journeyman Project Turbo! I remember mine came with all bunch of games and programs, but since i didn't know that much english back then, I didn't use any of them... I wish i could find a place to dl some of those just for kicks. Nostalgia always kicks in when hear the words Packard Bell.

I used to work on them frequently. Friends had them. So yea they do bring back memories. But they were just slow rigs because the hardware was subpar frequently. If you at least got some L2 cache they weren't terrible.

One of my friends had a ~1993/4 PB 486 with no cache or PCI/VLB slots. It was all ISA. It even had integrated ISA Cirrus Logic video. Very slow. He installed a hugely expensive Pentium OD but of course it didn't do much because of how slow everything else was.

Wow, yeah, no point in trying to do a Pentium OD without something better than ISA for video. I had an AMD 486DX4-120 with a VLB video card and it still couldn't run Dink Smallwood or much of anything newer than Quake 1.