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10 Worst PC's Of Al Timel

Agent Orange

Agent Orange

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Content removed - provide a link to the original article and I will re-edit and place it back here.

Cutting and pasting the entire content of a recent article from a major online magazine is a very major infringement of copyright violation and is not covered by fair use doctrine.

-Mike
 
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What model Packard bell is that in the picture? Or more to the point where can I get one like that?
 
I have a working Barbie motherboard. Had the entire unit minus the plastic housing and scraped it four years ago. I think I have some cables and a few other parts too. It's tiny as hell and for sale. I think it measures like 10" x 10".
 
The Packard Bell was the Corner Computer with a nice albeit impractical case which Business Week gave a "best new product" recommendation. For a website, see http://home.fuse.net/bobwatts/packardbellcorner.htm Actually, Packard Bell had a bunch of nice looking cases; they hired frogdesign to do some improvements. Unfortunately, what went into the case was not quite as good as the case was.
 
My aunt and uncle still have a Dell Dimension 4600 going strong. One time it didn't turn on a few months ago, so my uncle lifted it a foot off the table and dropped it... came back to life. They did stink however, I remember getting quite a few dead ones in the shop due to Dell's "quality control".
 
krebizfan said:
The Packard Bell was the Corner Computer with a nice albeit impractical case which Business Week gave a "best new product" recommendation. For a website, see http://home.fuse.net/bobwatts/packardbellcorner.htm Actually, Packard Bell had a bunch of nice looking cases; they hired frogdesign to do some improvements. Unfortunately, what went into the case was not quite as good as the case was.
Click to expand...

So how do I get my hands on one? I don't really care about the innards, just the case would be pretty awesome.
 
I don't think that Packard Bell has a standard MB layout. The case does look nice, quite a few looked decent actually but the insides kind of sucked. Currently I have only one Packard belll in the house, a P60 or P66 machine (forget which) that I kept just because it was the first Pentium chips made.

On second look at my archives I also have a Packard Bell Statesman laptop.

These towers looked kind of neat (almost snagged a complete system locally but somebody else was faster):
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Packard-Bell-890498-Pizza-Tower-Case-204-/150652849007
 
Unknown_K said:
I don't think that Packard Bell has a standard MB layout.
Click to expand...

I doubt it would too. But I can work around that. And besides the original parts would work for a pretty nifty "tweener" machine. And it would sit really well under the shelf I made on my workbench.

Alas, it turns out that there are not very many available out there, I cannot seem to find any, and only a few references to it.
 
Unknown_K said:
I don't think that Packard Bell has a standard MB layout.
Click to expand...
On my older PB computer, most of the morts are on the bottom, the power supply is on the bottom, and the PCI card slots are on the top. Also, on the front, there's a door that opens up to reveal the floppy drives. Weird design, huh?
 
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Once i had one of those PB for repair, I can confess that the mainboard layout is different, like the case the mainboard is a corner. But a lot of computers from that time has a different mainboard layout, like Compaq or SGI.
 
I had to edit the original post in this thread to get rid of the content. Cutting and pasting an entire article directly is a major copyright violation, and is not covered by fair use.

If somebody appends a link here, I will edit the original post and put it there too.



Mike
 
My worst computers of the old stuff were not that brand specific, it more had to do with what idiot decided it was a good idea to hang the CMOS battery somewhere over the motherboard where it could leak onto the circuits and kill the board. I had 2 Packard Bells, a Dell, a Compaq Deskpro, and numerous "White Box" PC's with that problem upon arrival.

Packard Bells are not all bad, if I had kept going with grabbing them up, I'd probably have all the early 90's Reveal branded gear they came with. My current 486 has the FM Radio Tuner card and Video Capture card out of an old Packard Bell Multimedia special that had a battery rotted board, so they have some plusses in digging up some cool hardware. I also had a friend who had the Reveal MusicStar Keyboard attachment that PB sold for awhile. Sadly, I have yet to find one that was not battery rotted.

Pretty much anything whitebox with one of those NMB keyboards gets on my nerves as well. I've nabbed a few of those, and it feels like the return mechanism is made out of fart putty.
 
Agent Orange said:
Content removed - provide a link to the original article and I will re-edit and place it back here.

Cutting and pasting the entire content of a recent article from a major online magazine is a very major infringement of copyright violation and is not covered by fair use doctrine.

-Mike
Click to expand...

Sorry about that - never gave a thought about the legal ramifications. This article came to me via the net from a friend. I more or less figured that since credit was apparent on the 'by line', that there wouldn't be much of a problem with an article that was over 4 years old.
 
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I'm surprised that the article didn't mention the Sanyo MBC-550. Shipped with single-sided floppies and required you to load a BIOS from disk. Ran slower than a 5150 and compatibility with the 5150 was abysmal. I think of it as the archetype of what a PC shouldn't be.
 
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