Packard Bell

E

ebendl

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Hi all. My father is looking into buying a laptop, but unfortunately he is too quick to buy something from Incredible Corruption or other major stores. (Rarely listens to my advice when I give him sites/resellers with better service or prices. I believe he likes to 'see' something before buying).

Okay, so he phoned me a few minutes ago (while standing in IC) - he's looking at Packard Bell. Both the W3450 or the W7500 (thats the numbers he gave me). Now I am looking for reviews and recommendations on the net, but just wanted to hear if anyone have any experience with these?

I know IC gives pretty sh***y service, but I told him I'd check in any case.

Thanks all!

EDIT: Just looked at their website - pretty much suck. Can't find drivers directly, can't find specifications directly (have to go to a specific country's website - but SA isn't listed). Doesn't look good so far...
 
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Hi there I got a PB. r3330 laptop the amd64 1600 512 ram blah blah blah.
Had no problems at all had it for about three months now. The drivers are actually quite easy to find on the net as all the links are built into internet explorer on the machine. Previous laptops were hp and a compaq and quite frankly all the same although new one gives decent battery life and is pretty lite.

Hope that helps some what.

Cheers
 
There are better bands and laptops that are cheaper here in SA than the Packard Bell's. Look for somthing like Asus - its cheaper and easier to replace parts if something should break.

If you are looking for some prices on laptops you can E-mail me [Address in sig] and i'll give you prices. We ship though out the country and offer great service, unlike IC.
 
Thanks, but he bought an LG LW-60 something, he seems pretty happy.

E
 
Very Important!!

If you came across this thread to look for advice on whether to buy the Packard Bell W3450 17" Laptop read this first, if you allready has one please let me know if you are experiencing the same problem:

The extended keyboard (contains numpad) is wonderfull! Also the 17" is usefull to watch dvd's and multi-tasking, I use it alot to do my documentation for software, and it is wonderfull to be able to view 2 documents at the same time for cross-reverence. One downside of the 17" is that its battery is not so long lasting, It keeps me going for just around 1.5 hours. Another thing I love is the touchpad, it is really high quallity and extremely accurate to touch and movement.

Know the blooddy problems with this thing! Know can someone tell me how long it has been since DMA was invented? To Packard Bell it seems like they still has to figure it out. It's DVD-Writer(!!!) uses PIO Mode for data transfer, now as everybody surely knows it means that the CPU has to process all the data that is transfered from the DVD-Writer. This would not have been any problem if this was 'n 3Ghz P4 Laptop, but because we want to save power it houses a 64bit 1.8Ghz AMD Turion. And know the thing almost stops responding when you copy something from a CD-Rom, and even worse when you copy from a DVD. A futher downside of this is that when the thing is on battery it's CPU goes down to 800Mhz to save power,

as I learned the hard way, I thought it would be a good idea to show some photo's from 'n DVD to folks on my brand new 17" Packard Bell. Know booting up was no problem for the PB running on battery, but when I eventually got the DVD in and viewing the first photo, it took about 30 seconds to render each file in sequence as they opened. Now everytime the DVD-Writer had 'n hard time to read the DVD (which was actually fresh written, no scratches) it would stall for about 15minutes!!!!!! And this would happen the whole time, the thing would completely hang! This was quite embarrassing as the folks started talking about other things untill I had to admit this was 'n dead lost.

Know thinking I learned my lesson, later we dicided to watch a DVD movie on the nice 17" widescreen. Well I insist that we put it on power, to prevent the 800Mhz speed problem, well to make this short the movie played as if it was recorded at 'n very low framerate, and the sound sounded like the acters had 'n frog in their throughts! The bluddy DVD-Writer is useless to read DVD and CD.

Know what make me so mad is the fact that I payed a whopping R13 000 for this thing. I thought I would buy once a good thing that could hold me a few years, well as soon as I can I'm going to get another one!

My advice would be if you are about to buy a Laptop first take Nero CD/DVD Speed on a memory stick and test the drive for CPU usage. On AC and Battery!

If anybody come accross this post and experience the same problem or not at all, leave me a note at [email protected]. Cause if this is 'n problem with mine only I'm taking it back.

Cheers,
Waste
 
I got a hp compaq. same processor 1.8 turion.
I did give me that problem before, but couldnt u go to the bios and put all the settings on full?
Then ur cpu will stay at full speed on battery, only problem is the battery time is even shorter, but least u can do ur work~

Never experienced the dvd prob though :p
 
nobody makes optical writers that are pio mode only anymore. forget it, but your problem is a windows one, not a packard bell one.

so, to solve.
if windows detects a large amount of errors coming from a drive, it forces the drive into pio mode (think of it as a failsafe)

you have two options:
1) edit the registry to reset the number of errors back down to zero
2) remove the ide controller that the optical drive is attached to, in device manager (normally secondary ide controller)...on reboot windows will redetect the controller, as well as the drive, and put it all nicely back into dma mode.

it probably happened in the first place form trying to play something that was scratched...check event viewer and you will probably see loads of yellow bangs for one particular date, and think to yourself "oh ja...now i remember...it was that cd that didnt want to play"

a simple case of a little bit of knowledge being a dagerous thing.
 
Hey that makes sense, no wonder my dvd drive for my pc is messed up now and takes forever to read~
And they're all LG ;)
 
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