Re: packard bell ?

Dances With Crows wrote: 
On 26 Jan 2006 08:36:39 -0800, greg staggered into the Black Sun and
said:

I keep hearing bad things about Packard Bell. 


Yep, they made a bad name for themselves by selling cheap crap.


They have good deals on AMD based [desktops]. Should I go for one, or
[put together] a homebuilt machine with the same components?



Avoid Packard Bell, and for $DEITY's sake, don't use the same components
that they'd use.  Buy *good* components, not cheap ones.  These will
have fewer unexplained weird problems.  Diagnosing and fixing
unexplained weird problems with hardware is usually a total waste of
your time.  HTH,


That's a bit steep...

Packard Bell is fairly unsual in OEM-world for using off-the-shelf components from major manufacturers for the last 8-odd years. An average Packard Bell has an MSI or Gigabyte motherboard, FSP PSU, Seagate HDD and MSI videocard. Most of their bad rep comes from one of two sources:

- before 1999 they widely used obscure Intel OEM designs which were pretty reliable but had hopeless compatibility issues with all kinds of hardware
- 1999-2002 Packard Bell was particularly badly hit by the bad caps problem (capacitors leaking and exploding because of a design fault), mainly by virtue of the heavy use of MSI motherboards in that period.

Now that doesn't mean they are great systems these days - Packard Bell is a bottom-feeder, aiming for the great mass of computer illiterati who are not too fussy about performance but are swayed by flashy packaging, big-sounding slogans and low price. That means systems are built for marketing goals, not technical balance. Particularly the mid-range models feature comparatively powerful CPUs completely castrated by anemic integrated-VGA motherboards - but that is by no means a vice limited to Packard Bell: pretty much any major brand does the same, as most customers are uninterested in memory bandwidths and motherboard chipset efficiencies.

Oh, and the OEM software bundle is utterly crap of course, but as this is posted in a Linux group I assume that's pretty irrelevant ;)


Bottom line is that they are competent but utterly unremarkable systems these days, but that any 'great deal' probably involves a massively imbalanced top-heavy system. Better to go for a CPU at a few hundred MHz less on a better motherboard with a discrete videocard- far better performance for a similar price. If you're not happy with building your own, go to a small computer shop where they build their own PCs and get them to make you a balanced system. You'll be amazed how it can outperform similarly priced ready-made systems

Note that as an ex-employee of PB I have no love for the company (the way they treat their employees is far worse than the dodgy customer service they are better known for), but that I don't like to see the hardware (which cannot choose its owner) flamed for inaccurate reasons.


Oh, and on-group:

'Of course' PB does not support Linux, but pretty much all hardware is (as already mentioned) standard. Even the Winmodems can be used: most PB stuff uses Smartlink riser-modems - www.smlink.com for Linux driver download (source, so pretty widely compatible), some use PCTel, www.linmodems.org has a funny story (and driver link) for them. That aside, it's standard fare.
.

Loading