Packard Bell may not a name you immediately associate with the latest word in netbooks, but now that it's part of Acer, all that may be about to change. Acer has big plans for the Packard Bell brand: it intends to develop PB into the very acme of trendy tech desirability. Apparently. Packard Bell dot m/a Packard Bell's dot m …

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Monday 21st September 2009 14:17 GMT Anonymous Coward

AMD

So EU fine helped AMD to come back to laptops? And better still, it kicks butts of Atom. I like good, old-school competition ;)

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Monday 21st September 2009 14:17 GMT Swarthy

Whew!

Until the bit about the battery life, I was terrified that I might end up wanting a piece of Packard Bell kit.

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Monday 21st September 2009 15:02 GMT Anonymous Coward

Packard Hell....

Were crap back in their day, will be more crap now they've joined loins with acer whom also make crap.

Steer clear...

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Monday 21st September 2009 15:35 GMT david bates

To be fair to PB and Acer

I bought two recon PB P4s about 3 years ago - both have ticked along with no problems at all apart from one getting its LAN port fried by lightning and the fact that I can't be absolutely sure that their Gigabyte motherboards are vanilla so I dont dare update the BIOS.

Likewise my Acer lappy still plays nice after 5 years. If I was in the market for a new lappy I'd happily look at Acer or PB.

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Tuesday 22nd September 2009 06:20 GMT Anonymous Coward

Damn! 2 months too late

This was pretty much the netbook I was looking for, but failed to find. I ended up paying 500 notes for a Dell Vostro 1220: nice, zippy enough, but just a bit heavier and bulkier than I really wanted.

I could've had one of these AND a better battery for a fair bit less.

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Tuesday 22nd September 2009 06:20 GMT Anonymous Coward

The return of CrapHard Hell

I remember working for Dixons Mastercare PC service (Hangs head in shame, hence AC) back in '96.

Absolute, monumental, over-priced junk.

Hopefully, the new, Acer-flavoured kit will give them a better reputation.

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Tuesday 22nd September 2009 06:20 GMT Patrick 14

Why

I do not have a problem with PB, but I do have a problem with crap battery life and no cpu power.

I cannot see why they do not use the low power core duo or even a core 2 duo.

for the stupid money they are asking they could use a Real CPU drop in a 4400mah battery and still get over 2 hours battery if not more.

I had the Philips X67 a while back with a Intel Core Duo Processor U2400 1.2GHz, 533MHz, 2MB Cache. this was netbook size but had dvd rewriter and good speed and was only 1.6kg

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Tuesday 22nd September 2009 06:20 GMT Al Jones

If it's only lastting 68 minutes, it's not a netbook

Sorry, but for me, the defining characteristic of a netbook is that it's CPU uses sips power, rather than guzzles it. This AMD CPU may be a lot more efficient than it's desktop counterparts, but it clearly isn't up to the job of powering a netbook, if this benchmark is correct.

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Tuesday 22nd September 2009 06:20 GMT JeeBee

Battery Life Fail.

By "should be able to get 100 minutes" do you mean you tried running the machine doing normal netbook tasks and it lasted around that time, or are you guessing?

However even if it was two hours, that is not adequate for a netbook, where all-day computing (all-day meaning 4 hours or more, heh!) is expected. I don't know what the problem is - maybe a 1GHz CPU would have helped, or maybe if AMD managed to make a low power CPU + chipset combination. To be fair, AMD aren't chasing the netbook market at all, so aren't offering anything suited for this area. Maybe when AMD get 40nm 8xx chipsets out they will be able to underclock them for netbooks.

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Tuesday 22nd September 2009 13:15 GMT Anonymous Coward

Why no video acceleration?

The 690G has hardware acceleration for video decode, and works well in HTPCs. Is this capability missing from this model?

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Wednesday 23rd September 2009 20:27 GMT zanto

@ cornz 1

my acer aspire 4720z running fedora core and xp on top of virtualbox is a gem. i'd call it the best value for money deal you can get.

1 year later, i see other greenhorns such as you, pay double for a big brand laptop with vista, and they still turn green at my old acer. and xp is needed for the odd occasion when a client insists on me connecting to their network from home using a windows machine or when i need to edit an office document that has lots of graphics and tables in it.

i take it, you are not aware of how to actually use / configure a computer.

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Monday 28th September 2009 09:34 GMT bex

bottom feeders

Packard Bell for many a year put out so many underpowered laptops that they make Acer look high spec in comparison. PB as a name conjures up thoughts in my mind of some very poor quality kit and I wonder why Acer want to use the name.

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