Happy new year everyone!

I've recently acquired a Multimedia CLE in a similar case like @Macca70 above. You've got to marvel at the design with the MB flat on the bottom and a huge riser card so that the PCI cards are still positioned horizontally. Why not just mount the MB on the side like all other tower PC's? Don't know! Anyway, love it 😀

There's another case design, which I guess is a tower version of the Pulsar like @Pingaloka (see photo below). I've noticed there are models out there with very similar specs (Pentium MMX 200+). I've even seen the Pulsar-type with lower specs in the original advertisements than the former which has the more traditional 90's Packard Bell design. So what was the actual chronological order of release for these designs? I'm wondering if these models would have been available in the shops at the same time at one point. Does anyone know?

(Images taken from here and here)

Hi all, my name's Dave, and I thought I'd do a 2 in 1 post, to firstly introduce myself as a new Vogon's member, although I've been a guest user for some time, experience of getting my first PC, and why I'm now the proud owner of a Packard Bell. Sorry, it's therefore quite a long , but hopefully interesting post, especially for Packard Bell fans.

OK, so I'm a computer & gaming collector, have been for over 30 years, mostly 8 bit machines, including my first computer, a Vic20, and handheld electronic games, consoles etc. I've been involved with arcade emulation, and even built some PC based arcade cabinets back in the day. I used to mess around with synths, so up until my first PC, my main computer was a 1MB Atari STe.

My wife bought my first PC back in Christmas 96 from Crown Computers, a VTech Platinum Windows 95 multimedia desktop, with Tatung 14" monitor (I've used it in my Avatar). A custom built PC Partner system, with a Pentium 120mhz, 1MB Trio 64+, ESS1868, 8x CDROM, 1.2GB HDD and 8MB, but chose the option to upgrade to 16MB, costing an extra £99! All those PC magazines I'd bought to research what I needed had paid off, now I'd got it all setup, it was a great! ...until literally a few weeks later when the Intel ads started showing a new, better, faster MMX CPU. OMG, my £1299 PC, the most expensive computer I'd ever owned was already outdated! I remember being totally shocked, and then soon realised this was the pace of PC technology, and so the upgrades started, as did more stuff, software, scanners, printers, modems, and once commited, I kept up by building my own PCs. Eventually this upgrading stopped with the birth of my Son, and then around 2005 I realised I didn't play games on a PC anymore, and technology had evolved so much now, that most PCs had the power to do almost everything I wanted, newer ones could just do it better.

In recent years, and now older, I've become quite nostalgic for old laptops, and PCs, mainly because I miss the excitement of my first 90s multimedia PC, the often frustrating experience of using it, and appreciating the technology, which changed so quickly during that time. Back then, just owning a PC was a luxury, and it took skill just to setup the memory & sound in your DOS Star Wars game, not too mention installing all the new hardware upgrades. You learnt a lot, spent a lot, but felt like a computer expert, all very satisfying and rewarding. I miss those times, so sure I could build an old PC, but I'd done that, so started thinking about the popular high street PC's, systems which I'd totally missed out on then from the likes of Comet, Dixons, PC World, Tiny, Time, and many more. I soon realised there was one brand which was massively popular then, I'd never owned, and didn't actually know much about, Packard Bell. I then discovered a chap in the US on YouTube, who is absolutely passionate about them, leaving me to question if they were so popular, why most people now seem to think they were so bad and unreliable. What was the Packard Bell PC experience really like?

Whether you think I'm bonkers, or Packard Bell's are good or bad, I've now decided to go on a nostalgia adventure and find out for myself, and in the process, hopefully I'll recapture the fun and excitement of restoring and using an old desktop PC again.

Starting off, I wasn't looking for any particular model, I just wanted something from around the same era, Socket 7, Win 95/98, undamaged, and not too expensive. Most were too expensive, or too far away, but eventually found a Packard Bell Club 40, it ticked all my boxes, so I bought it, and my retro PC journey begins. It didn't come with any documentation or software, so firstly, I wanted to find out more about the system I'd bought. It still has it's original case sticker which highlights it's main features and software bundle, but found numerous sites such as this, UKT, Passion-PB etc, which have been invaluable in my research. So, based on all this, I have:

UK Packard Bell Club 40
GVC FR500 Socket 7 motherboard with SiS chipset (PB850) Rev E01
Integrated SiS5598 VGA (up to 4mb shared system memory, default)
Integrated Sound, ESS Audio drive 1869
Aztech PCi 56k Modem
32MB (2x16MB) Memory - 72pin EDO 60ns matched SIMMs
Cyrix MII 300 CPU (Actual 233 MHz?)
Goldstar (LG) 32x CDROM - Original
3.5" Floppy Drive - Original
Seagate 3.2GB IDE HDD - Original
OS/Software: Windows 98 + Packard Bell software bundle as per sticker (MISSING)

I'm not sure when it was released, but it would've had Win 98, not SE. It seems to be what was then a basic model in the range, and exactly the same as the UK Club 30, except this Club 40 includes a modem. The bundle included therefore also mentions additional internet related software, but otherwise the same. Specs seem to be the same as the international/US models, such as Club 300xi, Multimedia 820, and maybe others. The case is a facelift version of the older 4x4 ribbed box designs, as although the front panel is more modern & stylish, with soft curves, the rear and sides have the same ribbed trims.

Obviously, this is just the desktop PC unit, and I want a complete system, so have recently been pleased to find and add the following, hopefully era correct items so far:

Packard Bell 1015 14" CRT Monitor complete with side speakers (missing PSU)
Packard Bell 5132 PS2 Keyboard
Microsoft 2 button PS2 Mouse.

It had a standard Win98 install, rather than the PB original, so I reformatted, in preparation for hopefully finding and installing the original full software package. Unfortunately, I then discovered that to do this, Packard Bell used a PC specific Tattoo system, which was in a hidden sector on the hard drive, and contains information relating to that specific PC and it's hardware. As I understand it, this Tattoo determines what software is installed, but can only work by having the correct machine/range specific Boot Disk & Master CD combination.

Since New Year, I've been cleaning, checking, and testing everything, and it all seems to be fully working. A lot of effort, but worth it for the results, cosmetically it now looks great, just need to retrobrite some of the keys, and maybe the speakers which still have some slight yellowing, but nothing bad.

What's next? Well, disheartened by all this Tattoo/Master CD stuff, I'm hoping some of you guys can help out with the software side of things. I managed to figure out thanks to some great work by others, how to restore the tattoo information to the HDD/BIOS, but unfortunately have been unsuccessful in finding the correct Boot Disk/Master CDs to work for this system. Currently I have managed to get one to install somehow from archive.org but it's designed for newer, different hardware, and also uses EXTHS so the software versions are '99 versions, not '98, and it's missing the correct drivers, so stuck with 16 colour VGA. I could just install Win 98, and probably find the drivers, but it'd still be incomplete. I really hope I can locate the correct Master CDs / ISO for this system to install, so I can eventually have a complete, and original setup, just as it would've been, and fully appreciate and enjoy the experience of using a 90's Packard Bell PC.

That's a great introduction Dave, welcome to the Club! (sorry, can't resist)

I got a Multimedia CL 4711/R (posted earlier in this thread), which I think is a similar model. I'm also interested to restore to original factory software, but haven't really tried yet. There exists apparently another method that disables the Tattoo check on the Master installation CD by reverse engineering, but I don't know if such modified CD images are available anywhere.

Mind I ask some questions about your model? The ribbed trims seem almost white on your photo's. Is that the case, or it's just the lighting? I've only ever seen various earthy/grey trim colors before! Also, I'm eternally curious if yours (or any) similar Club model actually has an IR receiver behind the little black window in the top left of the front panel.

Hi, and thanks for the welcome.
I'll have to check out your Packard Bell multimedia model, as it's bewildering the amount of different models they made.

Re your questions:

The case & trims have come up looking lovely, but it's not white, but light ivory or extremely light earthy colour would sound about right. Most I'd seen looked pretty yellowed, so very lucky not needing to Retrobrite, although the monitor took more work to get the same.

The IR window I'll need to open and check, I know I've seen a model on eBay that came with a multimedia remote control. The advert information I found on an old African PB page suggests their model equivalent to the Club 30 /40 were base 'value' models, and the next models were proper multimedia (probably just better VGA) and did include a R/C. I'm curious too, so I'll let you know.

I've now opened the unit, and front cover to check for the IR sensor. I've posted the details in your dedicated topic Re: Packard Bell Club Machines with IR Sensor

For anyone interested, here are some more pictures of my Packard Bell Club 40, this time showing the internals, now all fully cleaned, and AFAIK, all original parts & spec.

Top Overview

Drives

Motherboard Overview

CPU/Heatsink/Fan - 4 X EDO 72pin SIMM Slots - SiS 5598 Chipset (Motherboard Rev E01)

Integrated ESS 1869F Sound (Modem removed)

Assuming this is the PB850 / GVC FR500 motherboard, which UKT mention as coming in either Rev B or D, I'm curious to know why my Club 40 has a Rev E01, and what, if any differences there are. Looking at UKT's motherboard diagrams, the layout of this appears to be identical to the Rev B board.

Hi Dave, thanks for checking about the IR (the search continues 😉 and for the internals pictures.. always great for reference!

I'm enjoying the heck out of my PB design obsession recently and your ivory case trims still fascinates me. I can't remember ever having seen it at the time. For comparison here's a picture of the side trim of my Mutimedia CL (same case as Club) against the base of my Designer Tower Multimedia CLE and a white A4 paper for reference. As you can see the former is not even close to white: more a kind of grey with some brown and (depending on light conditions) some green mixed in. It doesn't look to me like the original color has deteriorated much: front and back of the trim piece are the same. The designer tower base is a plain grey, which I think resembles the later Milano and Pulsar colors.

Anyway, nice to know there were white-ish trims as well, I love these little design details.

I recently had to let go of my Packard Bell Multimedia 486SX-25Mhz flatbed PC. The photos I still have are missing the CD drive. It came with a TV Tuner card connected to the on-board OAK VGA card (hell of a slow card 😅).

The turbo button brought down the machine speed to what seemed like 4.7MHz! My only gripe with it was that it didn't have a turbo display. And its BIOS won't POST if you connect it to any storage thing larger than 504MB (HDD, SD/CF Card).

The power supply is kinda proprietary in that its power switch is hidden inside the PSU box, and the case has a long plastic arm that pushes against that internal switch when depressing the power button on the case.. over-engineering?

The motherboard has 4MB RAM on-board (not removable).

It came with a Packard Bell-branded Windows 3.11 (logo screen, startup sound and some PB software).

It had a pompous boot screen too 😄

wbahnassi wrote on 2023-01-28, 02:23:

I recently had to let go of my Packard Bell Multimedia 486SX-25Mhz flatbed PC. The photos I still have are missing the CD drive. […]
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I recently had to let go of my Packard Bell Multimedia 486SX-25Mhz flatbed PC. The photos I still have are missing the CD drive. It came with a TV Tuner card connected to the on-board OAK VGA card (hell of a slow card 😅).

The turbo button brought down the machine speed to what seemed like 4.7MHz! My only gripe with it was that it didn't have a turbo display. And its BIOS won't POST if you connect it to any storage thing larger than 504MB (HDD, SD/CF Card).

The power supply is kinda proprietary in that its power switch is hidden inside the PSU box, and the case has a long plastic arm that pushes against that internal switch when depressing the power button on the case.. over-engineering?

The motherboard has 4MB RAM on-board (not removable).

It came with a Packard Bell-branded Windows 3.11 (logo screen, startup sound and some PB software).

20220825_135202.jpg
20220825_135210.jpg
20220825_132346.jpg20220825_140650.jpg

It had a pompous boot screen too 😄

20220825_131421.jpg

Very nice case and with the older-style logo! Could well have been one of the last models before the change to the "Face of Technology" logo.

What's a turbo display? Super VGA?

pbagain wrote on 2023-01-28, 22:44:

What's a turbo display? Super VGA?

No. It's the small led digits panel on the case that shows the speed of the CPU (e.g 33, 40, 66) and changes those numbers when you press the Turbo button on the case.
This PB case has a two-color led below the turbo button. It's green when turbo mode is active, and orange otherwise. It's hard to remember which is which.. hence my preference for a digital indicator.

One other cool aspect about this PC is that you can enter the BIOS at anytime, not just during POST. IIRC Ctrl+Alt+S was the secret combo.

martin939 wrote on 2017-08-19, 20:53:

Almost brand new (100-120 hours). Had to replace a few caps on the mainboard, changed the Radeon VE (7000) to an FX5700 and upgr […]
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Almost brand new (100-120 hours). Had to replace a few caps on the mainboard, changed the Radeon VE (7000) to an FX5700 and upgraded the RAM to 512MB PC133 SDRAM. The CPU is an Athlon 1100, Thunderbird if I'm not mistaken.
Still uns on the original Windows ME install from 2001.

Don’t mind me asking, but what model of speakers are those?

Recently discovered I am the previously unwitting owner of a PB badge engineered clone, brother from the same mother more like, think they were both made by LG-Goldstar, an Apco XT which is 100% identical apart from badging and labels to a PB VX88. No beauty shots yet tho. Though come to think of it, also have a Zenith notebook that was also a PB Statesman or something.

I had a multimedia Pentium 120 MHz, which was a nice one
I have some old photos from it, I will upload it.

Post-sellout PB but my mom (an accountant) bought me this used laptop from one of her customers around 2004: https://allegrolokalnie.pl/oferta/retro-lapto … -igo-versa-e400 (no affiliation, just nice photos and no 5 attachment limit 😁 )

Apparently called an "iGo 4000" (but the bottom only says Versa E400, NEC's name, and the top only "iGo") I think it cost 400 or 500 € and, in retrospective, a little sketchy, but I certainly did enjoy it until Christmas 2008:

• Battery died in like 20 cycles (and was down to 10 minutes from 80 or so after a couple)
• 4 (FOUR) USB1 ports with decent spacing, come on, this "cheap" computer from a time where USB was certainly big but still not universally dominant beats most laptops and even a few desktops of the past 15 years...
• French keyboard, took a bunch of time to get used to it but was worth it (lots more symbols than an Italian one, unshifted '/', dead keys for accenting everything even in uppercase)
• The brightness buttons work regardless of OS and there's even an LCD on/off one (even better than Thinkpads: both the keys and the backlight control are completely invisible to software)
• 56k modem, nothing special but was nice during summer holidays at my grandparents' with IE6, OE (for newsgroups), Eudora, and of course Flash games - open about 10 tabs windows (invariably including TRsRockin) while syncing newsgroups (invariably including it.hobby.elettronica), disconnect, and read for hours for almost free 👍
  Of course when it's not your family paying for the phone (we rented with ~40 people an old villa/elementary school for 2007 New Year's, no phones in sight but a socket in the room we kids were, and someone still paid for service) go wild all night!
• Ethernet, what's that? I bought a crossover cable in 2006 thinking it would allow me to copy stuff from our desktop but had zero idea of how to actually transfer things! I think I first really used it in 2011 to play Minecraft with a friend 😁
• Cardbus 802.11b card bought to use a neighbor's open network (found with with then popular scanning software "Mario Kart DS", of course)
• Summer in a seaside town with local friends? Depending on the time that meant Openoffice Draw for making marble tracks, Lunar Magic and ZSNES for making Mario levels, never enough saved pages to have something to read that wasn't comics or newspapers, or crap off computer magazine CDs 😀
• See those arrow keys under the touchpad? A wheel substitute, you'd think? Technically yes but I only found the (very sketchy) driver in 2018, and like trackpoint scrolling it uses its own reinvention of the wheel (heeee) that works only with programs that didn't reinvent the scrollable control, and the buttons (soldered directly on the motherboard) are dirty...
• Even though like anything pentium 4 is better as a bed heater, still works fine (with original disk and monitor to go) unlike that ripoff of Vaio FZ21M that replaced it, indeed until 2016 or so it was the family choice for running some sketchy or XP-exclusive program 😀
• The least comprehensive firmware I've seen! RTC, boot order (HDD/CD/nonexistent FDD/network), PAL or NTSC for S-video, ethernet/sound/modem on/off, and that's it!

Curiously if you search online iGo 4000 you inevitably find 3rd party battery sellers suggesting this was also rebranded as Lenovo E100 but that article's pretty much the only page I found in 10 minutes mentioning that, and to find it I had to write Lenovo in Chinese (联想)...

I just bought a Packard Bell iMedia 5108 from late 2001 that contains its original software. Imported from the UK! I also am getting its original keyboard and mouse too! However, I am not getting the original speakers. I’ve seen pictures of the blue Packard Bell iMedia Diamond Audio speakers, but I am not sure of the model number of those speakers. If anyone knows what model they are please let me know. They look something like this pictured here

Im restoring this packard bell i have.

it has a
Intel Advanced/HL (Hillary) PB570 board with 1.00.07.BY0R BIOS
Intel Pentium 133 CPU
40 MB RAM
Onboard Cirrus Logic CL-GD5430 with 1MB Memory
Aztech AZT2316R Sound/Modem Card I38-MMSN841
Quantum Bigfoot TX 8GB HDD (a HDD that i had on hand, it works fine so i am using that.)
Windows 95 C OSR 2.5 (Generic Win95 install)

cyclone3d wrote on 2022-05-24, 15:39:

Thanks for the links. I have seen that first linked page before. Not super useful since there are no specs but I guess it is som […]
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Thanks for the links.
I have seen that first linked page before.
Not super useful since there are no specs but I guess it is something.

The 120CD I bought I think has been upgraded.
It has a modem, NIC and sound card that has 4 metal 1/8" plugs and a game port. Not really finding pics of any Aztech cards that have that configuration.

Does your 120CD have a specification sticker? If so, could you share it?

I had a PB Legend 610 as my first computer. I got into IT the day I typed 'del *.*' in the DOS directory, that day would have been in late 1994.

That particular PB was a 486SX/25 with 6MB of RAM and a 107MB HDD. There was no audio card or CD ROM drive. By 1996 I had an ESS 1868F based audio card (forget the brand) and a Cyberdrive 120D Cyberdrive CD ROM as well as a Creative Labs 14.4 ISA modem. I also used a (now forgotten) co-processor emulator so I could run AutoCAD. I was running a stripped down install of Windows 95 on it, but eventually went back to DOS to use QModem Pro to ring up BBSs - Win95 ate half the drive space!

Anyway, last month I found a booting PB610 on eBay and bought it. It was a lesser variant of my 610 having a 486SX/20 and 5MB of RAM....and no HDD. Amazingly I still have my old 107MB drive and it still works. Based on the timestamps of the files it looks like the last time I used it was early 1997. I went to attach some pics, but I guess my account can't do that.

Anyway, I now have it up and running and am getting it back into a more useable condition. I upgraded the processor to a ODPR 486DX/66 (much faster now) but the PB400 variant I now have caps out at 5MB of RAM, which stinks. I want to get a larger (504MB max limit) HDD solution in place so I can actually have the machine I was aiming for in the mid-90s: running Win95 with room to spare. It's a work in progress!

Windows9566 wrote on 2023-02-18, 03:09:

https://i.imgur.com/f7RiOjg.jpg Im restoring this packard bell i have. […]
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Im restoring this packard bell i have.

it has a
Intel Advanced/HL (Hillary) PB570 board with 1.00.07.BY0R BIOS
Intel Pentium 133 CPU
40 MB RAM
Onboard Cirrus Logic CL-GD5430 with 1MB Memory
Aztech AZT2316R Sound/Modem Card I38-MMSN841
Quantum Bigfoot TX 8GB HDD (a HDD that i had on hand, it works fine so i am using that.)
Windows 95 C OSR 2.5 (Generic Win95 install)

I have a very similar spec pancake version the C115.

I installed the need for speed se in it and it’s not very smooth. I’ll probably add a voodoo 1 to it but does anyone know what is the fastest cpu upgrade for this board is? Will it take a 233 max?

Hi,
I've just found a PB in my uncle's basement, it's is a Packmate x25 with a display, bought from Germany around 1991.

It has a 386SX CPU, no coprocessor unfortunately.

I've opened it removed a battery that was leaking, though the leak was small, and the PSU is dead. I'm gonna take it to my place and I hope to restore it to a working state. Fingers x'ed

I'm still in the process of restoring a 983CDT and was finding lots of useful info on the PBPlanet site, and of course it suddenly disappears and becomes an online radio station. I'm glad archive.org exists, so much information would have been lost. What are the odds of it suddenly shutting down just days after I finally get a Packard Bell? I'm still trying to figure out exactly what hardware it shipped with. It has the original hard drive but it has a Rage II+ DVD video card and I'm sure that isn't correct. Also has a SoundBlaster Pro PNP card and I think they usually came with those Packard Bell sound and modem combo cards but I'm not sure about this model. I'm going to track down the original keyboard and one of those remotes they came with also. I'll post pics once I get it all cleaned up and restored.