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Packard Bell Platinum XI - Any love? Or just old junk?

computerdude92

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I have one of these:

packy.jpg
(My actual photo)

It has a Pentium 166 Classic, and was upgraded to 64MB ram and a 4GB hard drive..

I don't have a use for it, so I'm tied between the thoughts - Recycle it or sell it to a collector on Ebay. What do you think I should do? I know Pentiums are worth less than a 486, and this is one of those low end and unspectacular Packard Bells. Thanks for any tips. ;)
 
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It's not junk and i wouldn't recycle it, May not be of great value but must be of some use to someone, personally i'd keep it, Those old machines come in handy but if you really want rid of it sell it on here or ebah.
 
I have one of these:

View attachment 35883
(My actual photo)

It has a Pentium 166 Classic, and was upgraded to 64MB ram and a 4GB hard drive..

I don't have a use for it, so I'm tied between the thoughts - Recycle it or sell it to a collector on Ebay. What do you think I should do? I know Pentiums are worth less than a 486, and this is one of those low end and unspectacular Packard Bells. Thanks for any tips. ;)

A few questions? Do you have the Packard Bell monitor with speakers that came with it? More importantly however, do you have the recovery media?
 
A few questions? Do you have the Packard Bell monitor with speakers that came with it? More importantly however, do you have the recovery media?

Nope, it's just the tower.

In my opinion, you don't need the Recovery discs to get it working. I've installed Win95 on it before and all I needed was a driver for the non-original sound card I put in it. Everything else worked with the drivers from the Win95 CD.
 
Pentium systems are nowadays worth selling on eBay IMO -- you're seeing high enough sale prices that it's worth the trouble and eBay fees to pack it up and ship it. Packard Bell was kind of a bargain bin name in the past, but a lot of people are nostalgic over them, since a lot of people owned them. My family owned a few over the years, and I've still got one of them :)
 
I see many of them on Ebay but they are not selling. I see ones priced at $100 with like 10-15 watchers but no sale. I bet I’d have to price it at $50 or $75 to win over the competition. In my experience you should sell systems with a price tag people are wiling to pay.
 
Maybe I should part it out and sell the internals with a whole bunch of other various PC parts in a lot auction then toss the case. That worked great in the past. Spare parts are better than nothing and they’re easier to ship out than a whole computer.
 
You could probably get $50-$60 from it, but the problem is that it costs that much to ship the thing.

I sold a similar machine (Packard Bell Platinum I) to a VCF member awhile back and shipping was something like $66 via UPS.

I'm not a fan of Packard bell machines myself due to their proprietary nature. The Platinum series like the one in the OP has the slots on a riser board, with the motherboard in the base. This machine is extremely tedious to take apart and service, and connectors are hidden in the protruding feet, requiring partial disassembly to plug in the IDE and floppy cables. The one I had also was extremely picky about memory and PCI bus resources, it took me hours of swapping cards in slots and RAM sticks around because there wasn't enough configuration space for the devices on the bus.

Maybe I should part it out and sell the internals with a whole bunch of other various PC parts in a lot auction then toss the case. That worked great in the past. Spare parts are better than nothing and they’re easier to ship out than a whole computer.

Just don't be "that guy" and separate the motherboard from the riser board with the slots, because the chances of a complete working product from ever happening again are pretty close to nil.
 
Nope, it's just the tower.

In my opinion, you don't need the Recovery discs to get it working. I've installed Win95 on it before and all I needed was a driver for the non-original sound card I put in it. Everything else worked with the drivers from the Win95 CD.

One of the things besides the Frog Design case that made a Packard Bell unique was the stuff that came with the Recovery CD. FastMedia, Navigator, The bundled software. You can get away with making it just a Windows 9x machine but you're missing out.
 
One of the things besides the Frog Design case that made a Packard Bell unique was the stuff that came with the Recovery CD. FastMedia, Navigator, The bundled software. You can get away with making it just a Windows 9x machine but you're missing out.

Someday when I get my hands on a Packard Bell 486, I ought to check this out.
 
What is so special about the 486 models?

I don't know, I've never had any, but I've always liked 486 systems better. Never liked Pentium systems that much. Pentiums are misfits. They're too fast for speed sensitive DOS games and too slow for many Win9x games. Also turbo does not work the way it did on a 486 or it won't work at all.

Now a 486 is fun, you can change the cpu speed with a touch of a button, DOS games of the era that run on it are awesome, and the hardware in general is more interesting.
 
If you decide to part it out, I'd be interested in the motherboard possibly. Depends on whether they fit the mini tower PBs.
 
You know, that looks like the very first computer I used. makes me feel kinda nostalgic, though i recall my dad's old pac bel looking a lot chunkier.
 
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