Packard Bell Quality
Packard Bell has had its share of bad publicity... Most of it is due to their slow performance and "supposed" incompatability. The slow performance is definitely real, why... I couldn't tell you. Their benchmarks just always fall behind the competitors year after year. The compatability issue is mostly rumors spread out of control. When it comes to compatability on PC's all manufacturers must comply to the same standards. However, working with Packard Bell's all day I tend to see a trend of "problem" models. When I say models I am referring to the Motherboard style, or MBI. This is not the model number on the front of the case. The motherboard style is listed in the system credentials sheet packaged with the computer. Motherboards are classified in "families," for example if your system credentials say you have a 685 motherboard then it is classified the same as 680 motherboards.
Here are some of the Motherboards that have many known issues (problems that packard bell is aware of but will not tell you unless they are trapped in a corner and cannot think of a way to make it sound like it's not their fault):
600 aka the "wildcat": Known mostly for randomly losing access to the cdrom drive. In other words, you go to "my computer" and your cdrom drive is missing. The fix requires editing the registry. Besides, there are well over 20 known issues with this motherboard.
685: Also a bunch of known issues and a lot of trouble keeping their IDE controllers out of confict in the device manager, which causes freqeunt lockups, general protection fault errors, and slow performance.
810: Also a bunch of issues, but there is one that really sticks out on this one. Some releases of this motherboard were built with one too many resistors and after a while (usually right after your warranty expires) the RTC (real-time-clock) starts losing hours; meaning that when you turn the computer off for the night and back on the next morning it will be an hour or two behind. The only way to fix it is to replace the motherboard which cost well over $200. Of course, that is out of your pocket.
Check back frequently. I will post more later.