Pentium 1 that is slow and has more than 64MB RAM? You could try to remove memory till you're at 64MB or less and see if this helps?

What's the exact model number of your motherboard?

And apparently there was an older thread about your system here on Vogons packard bell question
I'm still reading up, so hold on 😜

edit: Is this your board? http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/pb/mb/810.htm
If so, then your board might be reacting slowly because the chipset (i430VX) on your board can't cache above 64MB with a Pentium CPU.
I'd still suggest you remove the excess 32MB which should leave you with 64MB and see if this helps. If not, then there might be some other problem, but that could be anything depending on your circumstances.

I don't know about the games though, but isn't Quake supposed to be very old compared to your system?
I don't know if Radeon 7000 is any good for games (I thought it was more a budget offering, but I really don't know as I never used one).
Do you have any other PCI graphics cards at your disposal you could try? Voodoo 3 would be excellent, even if it's a bit overpowered for a Pentium 1 or perhaps some GF MX PCI?

I know it's unpopular on VOGONS to hate on Packard Bell, but I just find the title of this thread rather amusing.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I know it's unpopular on VOGONS to hate on Packard Bell, but I just find the title of this thread rather amusing.

^+1

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I know it's unpopular on VOGONS to hate on Packard Bell, but I just find the title of this thread rather amusing.

Yeahhhhh, I saw the irony in that too.

Tetrium wrote:

I don't know about the games though, but isn't Quake supposed to be very old compared to your system?
I don't know if Radeon 7000 is any good for games (I thought it was more a budget offering, but I really don't know as I never used one).
Do you have any other PCI graphics cards at your disposal you could try? Voodoo 3 would be excellent, even if it's a bit overpowered for a Pentium 1 or perhaps some GF MX PCI?

Quake is actually the same year as the machine 97. Though with packardbell the components are always way older. 🤣

The radeon 7000 is kinda like a geforce 2. It has a 100 something mhz gpu and 64mb of ddr. I have the proper windows 98 drivers and directx installed/ I'll try less ram and see what it does.

CelGen wrote:

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I know it's unpopular on VOGONS to hate on Packard Bell, but I just find the title of this thread rather amusing.

Yeahhhhh, I saw the irony in that too.

Now you guys got me laughing too. 🤣

I have immense nostalgia for old packardbells but man they sure are their own special kind of horrible.

emosun wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

I don't know about the games though, but isn't Quake supposed to be very old compared to your system?
I don't know if Radeon 7000 is any good for games (I thought it was more a budget offering, but I really don't know as I never used one).
Do you have any other PCI graphics cards at your disposal you could try? Voodoo 3 would be excellent, even if it's a bit overpowered for a Pentium 1 or perhaps some GF MX PCI?

Quake is actually the same year as the machine 97. Though with packardbell the components are always way older. 🤣

The radeon 7000 is kinda like a geforce 2. It has a 100 something mhz gpu and 64mb of ddr. I have the proper windows 98 drivers and directx installed/ I'll try less ram and see what it does.

Just ftr, Quake was apparently released in 96 and Quake 2 in december 97.
Quake (not Quake 2) has very low system requirements and should've run fine on the stated rig, yet it didn't.
Quake 2 has higher system requirements though, perhaps emosun was referring to Quake 2 instead of Quake 1?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I know it's unpopular on VOGONS to hate on Packard Bell, but I just find the title of this thread rather amusing.

PCBONEZ wrote:

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I know it's unpopular on VOGONS to hate on Packard Bell, but I just find the title of this thread rather amusing.

^+1

CelGen wrote:

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I know it's unpopular on VOGONS to hate on Packard Bell, but I just find the title of this thread rather amusing.

Yeahhhhh, I saw the irony in that too.

I don't hate PB, as long as it has serviceable parts for me to plunder before ditching it's emptied carcass 😁
The PB motherboards were not bad I think, but the way they build their systems (cramped cases, bad airflow, meagre PSUs, parts with poor performance, customized Windows) should be an example of how not to build a rig. They were made to sell and frankly, some of the PB cases did look pretty nice, but I always hated that custom single-piece front panel block which made it harder to put another motherboard in there.

emosun wrote:

I have immense nostalgia for old packardbells but man they sure are their own special kind of horrible.

^+1

The only off the shelf PC I ever bought new was a PB 486 in 1995.
I should have taken it as an omen when the very first time I powered it up the monitor popped and started spewing black smoke out it's vents before POST even finished.
The RMA took like 2 months.
.

PCBONEZ wrote:

^+1 […]
Show full quote

emosun wrote:

I have immense nostalgia for old packardbells but man they sure are their own special kind of horrible.

^+1

The only off the shelf PC I ever bought new was a PB 486 in 1995.
I should have taken it as an omen when the very first time I powered it up the monitor popped and started spewing black smoke out it's vents before POST even finished.
The RMA took like 2 months.
.

Back when I was still doing computer repairs, we used to name those "Packard Hells" 🤣

It should run quake flawlessly, I have the exact same machine and it's pretty good even without any upgrades.

I'll dig it out tomorrow and try Quake 1 and 2, mine is still the original Pentium 166 with on board sound and 24MB ram. Fairly certain it should perform well though since I use an older 1996 Platinum 55 as my main retro rig and it performs well. It does lag on 3d screensavers though but I've even got a few P3 machines that do too so I think that has to do with the gfx accelerator more than anything.

Also don't be hatin' on Packard Bell, personally I think these machines get a bad rap. All the examples of them that I have come across have been easy to repair and have been pretty decent little work horses with a fresh install of Windows. I too have a bit of nostalgia for them though, my childhood PC was a 4x4 style Packard Bell and we even got one just like my designer tower (far right) later in the 90's.

You should open a replica mid-90s radioshack (museum), and put those on display.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

You should open a replica mid-90s radioshack (museum), and put those on display.

Don't we all have living museums by now? 😀

And it doesn't matter to me if someone likes a type of computer that I don't personally like, I've for instance never liked those old IBMs and prefer PC clones (especially towers).
But I don't like Dell either, just the clones will do for me 😀

King_Corduroy wrote:

It should run quake flawlessly, I have the exact same machine and it's pretty good even without any upgrades.

I'll dig it out tomorrow and try Quake 1 and 2, mine is still the original Pentium 166 with on board sound and 24MB ram. Fairly certain it should perform well though since I use an older 1996 Platinum 55 as my main retro rig and it performs well. It does lag on 3d screensavers though but I've even got a few P3 machines that do too so I think that has to do with the gfx accelerator more than anything.

That sounds good. The game I had most trouble with was need for speed 3 , which was slow even on the lowest settings if you could try that and see what it does that would be amazing.

You're on a roll!
-- Need for Speed -- Is too slow.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Also don't be hatin' on Packard Bell, personally I think these machines get a bad rap. All the examples of them that I have come across have been easy to repair and have been pretty decent little work horses with a fresh install of Windows.

🤣 , again I have much nostalgia for them. But It's not about our experience , it about the majorities experience.

PCBONEZ wrote:

You're on a roll!
-- Need for Speed -- Is too slow.

I have a literal need for speed. 🤣

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I know it's unpopular on VOGONS to hate on Packard Bell, but I just find the title of this thread rather amusing.

OP answered his own question. 😜

Good old Pack-up Bell. My Pulsar 16 was always unusually slow. With an MMX-233 it could just barely compete with an X5-133 and would lose if the X5 was ramped up to faster clock rates. Never really figured out why, but as Packard Bell were one of the universal punch lines back when the system was around (1997?) I didn't look into it very much and just replaced the machine with one I built myself. Now I just use it as a fail-over P75 system. I never saw it as a bad machine, it wasn't really unreliable most of the time, but I always knew it was slow.

It did get much, much worse after having played Blood for extended periods of time and I never figured that out either. In that case, I think it's just bad luck because every time I play it, the system I play it on dies whilst running the game or shortly after playing it. Usually drive failure, but it's taken a few graphics cards as well. I don't play it anymore.

Seeing as we're on the OEM discussion, Compaq was the only OEM I would touch from back then. The Deskpro was an unstoppable beast and their business class laptops were solid.

I've probably said this before elsewhere on this forum, but my personal experiences with Packard Bells have been nothing but positive. My Legend 300CD seems to be pretty solid for a Pentium 60/430LX "Mercury" chipset system (no FDIV bug, but that doesn't bother me at all). Other than that, I had a 486-based PB with a DX2-50 that worked fine despite this happening to its motherboard:

After getting rid of that battery and washing the board, it was still fine, though it always seemed to perform closer to a fast DX-33. I can't remember if it had any cache or not. Ultimately, I wound up selling it. I also briefly had one that was in the "Designer Tower" case (the rightmost case in King Corduroy's pic) that I wound up using for parts.

It wouldn't surprise me if OP's system was slow because it has >64MB RAM. Honestly, I wouldn't go higher than 64MB in any P1 system, but, as already suggested, I'd try decreasing the RAM to 64MB and see if performance improves.