The name Packard Bell became utterly rancid here in the United States in 1999, and NEC, who was its parent company at the time, discontinued the name here as a result.
OMG the youngins in the US have no idea just how bad Packard Bell was. If they think there’s cheap plastics in modern computers…let’s not even speak about some of the systems that actually shorted out in the chassis…or laptop screens that were broken upon unpacking the box. Worse than hot garbage because that would intimate that it actually turned on at some point.
Not any better in their European ilk . I had one of their budget laptops. Destroyed 2 hard drives in the warranty period (probably a design flaw causing the drive to vibrate). After the second warranty claim I was offered an exchange after they “lost” it.
I had a Packard Bell with an 8088 clone running around 8MHz. It was amazing; 20MB HDD (which was practically infinite for DOS games of the era), and it only gave out in the early 2000s, being a 1987 system. Not all Packard Bells were bad, friends :)
It is so weird to me that I have seen several thousand dollar laptops of this era die with in a few short years, and yet the bottom of the barrel dribble, and odd ball mid-range stuff somehow still working 2 decades later. My roommate had a Dell XPS laptop with a mobile Nvidia graphics card in it, a card that was suffering failures due to solder joints cracking. The failures were happening between 8 months to 2 years. My roommate never had any issues in nearly 8 years of ownership. The fact he rarely turned it off is likely what saved that machine, because the GPU rarely saw the massive temperature swings from being turned on and off, and I know many people that will often game on their computers or consoles, and shut them off directly after pushing the hardware hard. The hardware cooks in stagnant air, and goes from high temps to room temp instead of a less stressing middle ground with constant airflow.
I think the reason these older, kinda bad, machines survived up until now is because people stopped useing them rather quickly, or they lived quiet lives getting typed and surfed on, as in non gaming loads. The expensive laptops got used up, especially the older nvidia GPU-powered ones.
a lot of those failures were actually related to the same reason xbox 360 and early ps3 gpus failed. if you get a chance look into bumpgate and how and why it happened.
Keeping it short - heat. Your roommate probably took better care and clean his laptop regularly :) With the GT 8xx it was inevitable because of manufacturing issues (which nvidia ignored and never took responsibility for) but every other generation was the same, keep it cool enough and it will last forever.
Can confirm: I own an Acer Aspire E15 powered by an FX 7500 (yes you read that right, MOBILE FX!) and an R7 M265 and it simply refuses to die. Granted, I bought it for college in 2016 and never really pushed it too far, nor do I need a laptop all that often...But I do sometimes wish I had a laptop that could run games from the last decade...
I too from A.Z. 😂😢😮 .. I seen an older laptop solid gaming .. on diffrent channel of guy who has small shop in Fla. ? I've taken in laptops as a hobby an hav a small collection of sum older retro pc games 🎮 ..😂😂 as I'm not a big fan of online gaming . ??
For the Unreal gold issue: The game bases its speed around the speed of the cpu. This was fine when cpus ran at the speed on the box all the time. But as processors started to change speeds with downclocking and turbo boosts, it messed with the game since it was expecting 400mhz when you booted it up but now the cpu is running at 2ghz.
I turn 27 this year and the whole laptop as a tv thing is still super relevant for me in the year of our Lord 2025. When I'm out in a hotel for work, I immediately unhook whatever cable or satellite tv service is plugged into the hotel room TV and plug in my laptop instead. Wireless mouse and keyboard and its a dream not being forced to watch boring normal tv when RUclips is 100% of what I watch.
from someone who is still using a 14 year old laptop just fine with no performance issues, I think we have reached a point where technology progress has slowed down significantly to affect performance significantly, I cant wait for a time when 20 year old laptops will still be usable for daily use. If you install Linux on that machine maybe add a gig of ram if there if space for it i think it can be comfortable for daily use.
I found this one to be amongst the best looking laptops I have seen. Any era. That huge screen looking that crisp and clear and that old was certainly an eye opener. The gloss surface you so carefully buffed back to its high gloss self added much to its attraction for me, too bad it will be an absolute finger print magnet. Value here is very evident to me. You did nothing to it outside of a surface clean and it ran away with everything you threw at it. Well, ran 'OKay' with everything you threw at it. Still I loved it. A banger as they say. Run of 6. Home run. Pushover try. A hat trick. Perhaps my sports metaphors are lacking but you done good, bub. Thnks again.
This laptop is a treasure! 1) Look at how good it looks and how well - preserved it is! 2) It`s amazing how a SINGLE core can run this thing so effortlessly! 3) it`s the cheapest, really? That laptop is for keepers, for sure!
I've said this before, but man, your enthusiasm is so darn refreshing and fun! As for these older laptops, they have been super under-the-radar for a while now, and I've grabbed quite a few of these (not the exact machine, but very similar) and they've ranged from a Sony Vaio VGN-FW11M for £7.50 which was bundled with an MSI laptop, which is a great little gaming laptop, all the way to a Dell Latitude 610 that I got for about £15 which needed a new screen. These are so underappreciated, and they will skyrocket in the future, in my humble opinion. :D
Similarly to the Acer Gaming/Media Laptop you reviewed some years ago with the Pentium 4. Funny enough during the first year or so of Covid a family member picked up some PS4s, Xbox Ones & an Acer Gaming/Media Laptop (2007-2008.) I tested the consoles and they worked, the laptop was a AMD Athlon 64 cpu variant of the one you checked out with a 17' screen and a dual hard drive internal caddy. It is a beast at running Windows XP 32 Bit, one of my favorite things is picking these up and seeing what the 2000 - 2013 laptops can do since many people overlook platforms ripe and very fast for XP. AM3 & AM3+ is a very good platform for Windows XP gaming on the cheap.
Thank you for leaving this comment! I was so sad that nobody else noticed it when scrolling through the other replies that I was about to say it myself.
Hi, i wanted to Tell you, i Love your Videos, this relaxed way with the Jazz music Always makes me enjoy my time while i Grind items in Games or Just sit in front of my PC and have Lunch. 👍
My first modern pc was a Packard Bell back in 99, haven't seen one for >20 years. My first home computer was a zx81 followed by a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. So seeing a PB laptop is a blast from the past and Windows xp was fantastic for the time. That remote control is something that seems a bit weird now but at the start of the millennium there was some strange ideas with computers back then. But after seeing this I wish I could afford one cause it looks great. Tough times atm so I'll have to wait. Great video though... 👏🏻
Very happy to see a relatable video, you uploaded this while I was playing Sims 1 on my Compaq Presario V3000, It has an AMD Turion 64 1 CORE @ 2GHz, 3gbs RAM and GeForce Go 6150 64mb. I was hoping I would be able to play Halo on mine but it runs terribly even on lowest setting at 800x600 Edit: Also running Windows 7 Pro lightened abit so that's probably a factor in the lacking game performance perhaps?
A Friday evening Budget-Builds treat-what a nice surprise! I didn’t expect a remote with that laptop. The last time I saw a remote with something PC-related was with my old Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty. And that chonky fox at the end? Adorable bonus!
I may warn you: Please disable the autodubbing feature in your RUclips Studio settings, the automatic dubs are AI-generated and will contain tons of mistakes, and viewers are more comfortable watching your video as-is, not with some AI talking over your voice.
@pikaaxytit kinda is, but (good) subtitles are better than a weird robotic voice that trashes the audio entirely. For a long time I only spoke spanish and subtitles were quite better than a dub, (obviously youtube dubs weren't a thing back then, but think of shows) but nowadays, on youtube, subtitles only work if they aren't AI subtitles or lazy transcriptions that cut off the sentence at the. Wrong moments and by result, break the translation entirely.
it's so cool seeing the retro laptops you can get on some parts of the world, I have got a SIM+ 1062 (Positivo) with a Pentium T3400 and a SIS M672 for free recently, which's almost that, but unfortunately it can barely run GTA Vice City or Half Life 2, despite being a 2009 laptop, all thanks to the "mighty" SIS... It doesn't even support DirectX9 fully.
You can change the CPU on your laptop, this generation is really good for this! The best you can use is the T7800. Need to check is the bios will be ok (cpu id and bios version).
@@antoinedrela794 I can, but I can't change the GPU, and the GPU is the bottleneck for everything on this laptop, that Pentium can run a lot more, but the only games I did run "decently" were on software render mode, or really, REALLY old stuff...
@@ToniaGlitched I have the same problem on my laptop, i changed the CPU for a better but the gpu is the weak point (Mobility Radeon HD 3450 512Mo). But at least i can play PS1 games with DuckStation. My laptop is from 2009, HP DV5 1210ef.
This really makes me miss the simple days of PC gaming. You didn't need AI upsampling, ray tracing, VRR(okay, gsync existed but no one really cared about it), black frame insertion, or any of that other stuff. You just needed a machine that played game good. I loved my ol' Athlon 64 laptop with Radeon x600 graphics. It ran Quake 4 perfectly, and that was all I needed.
Media-center (like) laptops were HUGE deal! I had used Toshiba or perhaps PB in early 2010s with full 3.5" HDD bay and could be booted as cd/dvd player. Quite nostalgic, but glad that era is long gone.
I had one of those HP media laptops with a similar remote, it wasn't a gaming laptop, it was for music and movies, the remote controlled Windows Media Player. I did have a few RTS's on it though back in the day, but the backlight failed on it after a few years and that was that. I loved messing with that little remote though.
I still have my childhood Dell XPS M1710, and it holds a special place in my heart. Like many XPS models, the GPU eventually gave out, leaving it unusable for years. Recently, I decided to replace the dead GPU with a refurbished one, and now I’m reliving my childhood, playing all those retro games buttery smooth. The M1710 is truly a gaming beast, but of course, I keep an eye on the heat with apps like HWMonitor or SpeedFan, just to make sure it doesn’t overheat again 😆
I had an HP laptop back in college that came with a remote like that and I used the remote quite often. I had a USB TV tuner that I used with Windows Media Center to watch cable TV that was provided in the dorms.
I did something similar recently... a bit of a cheat, but I got an Asus G2S laptop. Vista era, but came with Windows XP drivers. So it's my XP machine.
I was inspired by this video, and took to eBay to look for my own cheap Windows XP "gaming" laptop. I had forgotten that Packard Bell wasn't really a thing here in the United States during the 2000s, (funnily enough, my very first PC was a Packard Bell desktop that I purchased in 1993 or so). I did manage to snag one for $15, one of those "as-is" deals. I THINK it's a Packard Bell EasyNote Butterfly S with a dual Intel graphics card and a Radeon HD 4330. Screen is 1366x768. Seems like it should be perfect for XP era games. I don't think it will run Crysis well, but who knows. It also has 4 GBs of RAM. Not bad for $15!
Brilliant. We have a Packard Bell laptop running XP (Core 2 Duo T5200, 2GB DDR2, 160GB IDE disk) and it doesn't run games as well as that due to having Intel GMA. Not sure about whether your hard drive is IDE or SATA but you can definitely have 2GB DDR2. I'm also not surprised about the 0 minute battery life. Those PBs were well known for having batteries that died, and you couldn't get replacements either.
I'm planning to get a dell optiplex 380 desktop which has windows 7 but i have a hard drive with Windows xp on it só i will install the drive to the dell
Also the very old laptops, especially the cheap one doesn't have any battery protection/charge limiter, that has be careful not to leave it plugged in for too long while it's fully charged or otherwise the battery cells will be damaged very quickly
I enjoyed using the Delta game manager for my ePSXe games. The laptop was great for it, for the time. Ran FFIX quite well, along with all my old Win9x games, without the GeForce. Pentium M was a very specific epoch of computing, and it got me through undergraduate college.
I have a HP dv9000 series laptop running a GeForce Go GPU. Ended up upgrading the CPU and went to dual booting 64-bit XP and Vista. It's a fun retro laptop gaming experience when working within what it can play best. Having a large display and being able to do custom refresh rates to force 120hz is very nice. These laptop are weirdly special
One of my favourite laptops was an HP DV5T that was like this laptop -- multimedia touch controls, an internal remote control, great speakers -- it's crazy how we've gone backwards in features.
Packard Bell was not seen as a high end brand here in Europe either, just like with Medion and Compaq they usually was the budget friendly computers you could get in stores. Sure PB had a few higher priced products but the brand was mostly known for being cheapily built and well cheap. They also tried their hand on gaming computers with the iPower product line, don't think it sold well because it didn't last long before the iPower line disappeared.
You missed out on the most reasonable use for this... Downgrade to Win98. It's a single-core CPU, with a 6000 series GPU... That is literally the most perfect candidate for a maxed out Win98se retro rig.
I suspect that drivers wouldn't be very good, though. If you've watched MattKC's video on trying to make the fastest Windows 98 machine, you'll know what I mean.
And now all those laptops of that particular model are "sold out" is my guess xD Usually happens after about 34 hours from BB releasing a video. Same happens when LGR and other retro tubers release a video. xD
Laptops used to be so cool! I LOVE the included Remote Control and the fact it has dedicated graphics. Very impressed by this laptop especially for the price.
I remember these! A friend used to have one and at the time it was sooo cool. Also, makes you wonder what went wrong with OS software engineering in general if you have practically all the features you can think of in the footprint of win xp, when today 4gb of ram is the vrry bare minimum. That and I loved the fox cameo. Cute fella.
Sounds like it's got that good ole' Dothan core Pentium M Centrino. That was a WONDERFUL platform, power and performance wise. And the kicker was it didn't make much heat either.
went to a used computer store the other month and the guy was super cool in there, had the biggest windows vista acer gaming laptop I have ever seen. Guy didn't have the adapter I needed in stock but we got to talking and he worked out I liked to tinker with old stuff. Anyway, he wound up just giving me a pentium M NEC laptop and a another laptop that was filly dead. But the NEC I installed alpine linux to and it works pretty nice. I just have to find more ram since it only has a half gig and that really cant do much.
I have a Windows Vista laptop Toshiba Satellite P300 with 4GB RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 2.00GHz processor and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 graphics card. It ran Halo: Combat Evolved very terribly, same thing on Linux (Arch, because Debian couldn't do hardware acceleration for some reason), battery life was OK around an hour plus on Linux it'd suddenly shut down around 70% charge and I'd have to wait a little to be able to use the laptop past that. Installing XP on it made it run like a dream, gaming performance and battery life improved drastically.
These were so damn expensive back in the day, as a teenager it felt unbelievable someone could drop such money for a laptop, but now as an adult it feels almost like a pocket money.
There is more that can be done, there is pata SSDs, custom low resource usage, tweaking services and of course can always set performance mode to on and task priority to realtime. These would help to get a little bit more performance out of the Xp laptop. Increasing capacity speed and CS latency would aid with it a bit too
A 2010 MacBook Unibody makes for a great Windows XP gaming laptop. It's a bit finicky to get all the drivers working, but when it's finished, it's the best of retro and modern
I don't think I recall seeing Packard Bell laptops during the Windows XP era where I live. Dell, Compaq, HP, Toshiba...etc. sure, but not Packard Bell. I mostly knew them for their cheap, bloatware-filled desktops in the 90s.
Another thing people dont think about are AMD's original APU's, the A4, A6, and A8 3000 series, and A4, A6, A8, A10 5000 and 6000 series. All work in XP and provide decent performance, the original 3000 Llano series were some excellent overclockers. You could boost their clocks by like 50%, and actually get better performance, and battery life if you dialed in the right settings.
My "first" computer, the family computer my mom and I put together with an emachines case, power supply, disk drives and an IDE drive that was under 20 gigs that my grandpa gave us. We went and got a new motherboard and presumably a pentium from circuit city. I was about 7 in 2003 so I do not recall much about the machine other than taking an hour or more to download a single incorrectly labelled song from bearshare on dial-up.
I remember get my free xp gaming laptop in 2023 a acer Ferrari 3000 water damaged i used for some stuff for a year but sadly gave it away to my collage who does a course on computer hardwere we had a tear down of the devive before i said goodbye because i didn’t need it anymore as it was sitting in a pile of unused laptops
I remember converting a Celeron laptop to a core 2 duo from a dead Sony Vaio was a Toshiba Satellite with Vista Basic that I downgraded to XP SP2, it may have had intel graphics but it ran UT99 and the classic Serious Sam games fine which I was perfectly happy with
So many good quality well written games that could function well back then out of the box........I'd like to say "wow, look how far we've come" but we haven't, we have honestly gone backwards.
I had a Packard Bell EasyNote a Celeron M I think about 1.5ghz with 1GB of RAM in about... ooh 2009, 2010 ish, and my primary memory of it was how hellish it was to find drivers for it when I reinstalled. Easily the biggest hassle I've ever had getting a computer running.
I have a Packard Bell desktop PC sitting in my basement. It came with a Pentium MMX 233MHz CPU, 32MB of RAM, and... absolutely no L2 cache on the motherboard. They truly were trying to meet a spec sheet with as little money as possible. I heard that Packard Bell went out of business, at least here in the US, because they won a contract with Microsoft to build PCs for development purposes and used refurbished parts in some of the builds, while all new components was a stipulation of the contract. You can imagine Microsoft's lawyers having a field day with that one.
The name Packard Bell became utterly rancid here in the United States in 1999, and NEC, who was its parent company at the time, discontinued the name here as a result.
OMG the youngins in the US have no idea just how bad Packard Bell was. If they think there’s cheap plastics in modern computers…let’s not even speak about some of the systems that actually shorted out in the chassis…or laptop screens that were broken upon unpacking the box. Worse than hot garbage because that would intimate that it actually turned on at some point.
All I remember from my childhood was the funny Packard Bell logo on bootup.
I was almost 16 in 99 and was really into computers, I always thought of Packard bell as absolute sh1t.
Not any better in their European ilk . I had one of their budget laptops. Destroyed 2 hard drives in the warranty period (probably a design flaw causing the drive to vibrate). After the second warranty claim I was offered an exchange after they “lost” it.
I had a Packard Bell with an 8088 clone running around 8MHz. It was amazing; 20MB HDD (which was practically infinite for DOS games of the era), and it only gave out in the early 2000s, being a 1987 system.
Not all Packard Bells were bad, friends :)
It is so weird to me that I have seen several thousand dollar laptops of this era die with in a few short years, and yet the bottom of the barrel dribble, and odd ball mid-range stuff somehow still working 2 decades later. My roommate had a Dell XPS laptop with a mobile Nvidia graphics card in it, a card that was suffering failures due to solder joints cracking. The failures were happening between 8 months to 2 years. My roommate never had any issues in nearly 8 years of ownership. The fact he rarely turned it off is likely what saved that machine, because the GPU rarely saw the massive temperature swings from being turned on and off, and I know many people that will often game on their computers or consoles, and shut them off directly after pushing the hardware hard. The hardware cooks in stagnant air, and goes from high temps to room temp instead of a less stressing middle ground with constant airflow.
I think the reason these older, kinda bad, machines survived up until now is because people stopped useing them rather quickly, or they lived quiet lives getting typed and surfed on, as in non gaming loads. The expensive laptops got used up, especially the older nvidia GPU-powered ones.
a lot of those failures were actually related to the same reason xbox 360 and early ps3 gpus failed. if you get a chance look into bumpgate and how and why it happened.
@@vicolin6126 especially with bumpgate at play too
Keeping it short - heat. Your roommate probably took better care and clean his laptop regularly :)
With the GT 8xx it was inevitable because of manufacturing issues (which nvidia ignored and never took responsibility for) but every other generation was the same, keep it cool enough and it will last forever.
Can confirm: I own an Acer Aspire E15 powered by an FX 7500 (yes you read that right, MOBILE FX!) and an R7 M265 and it simply refuses to die. Granted, I bought it for college in 2016 and never really pushed it too far, nor do I need a laptop all that often...But I do sometimes wish I had a laptop that could run games from the last decade...
Ur excitement at the controller is charming af 😊
Keep it in your pants, Dave.
He's mine.
@@Harkruger Keep your words to yourself Harkruger.
He's MINE.
@Harkruger bwhahahahhaha
LOL that remote control shows how premium the laptop is ;) Cheers from Arizona!
Also, that numpad is beautiful as i dont like short keyboards
I too from A.Z. 😂😢😮 .. I seen an older laptop solid gaming .. on diffrent channel of guy who has small shop in Fla. ? I've taken in laptops as a hobby an hav a small collection of sum older retro pc games 🎮 ..😂😂 as I'm not a big fan of online gaming . ??
For the Unreal gold issue: The game bases its speed around the speed of the cpu. This was fine when cpus ran at the speed on the box all the time. But as processors started to change speeds with downclocking and turbo boosts, it messed with the game since it was expecting 400mhz when you booted it up but now the cpu is running at 2ghz.
Usually with the GoG version I never run into any issues with the speed problem, this has been the first time across countless PCs
@@BudgetBuildsOfficialI guess there's always a first time for everything :V
I have the steam version and unreal gold runs fine on my i5 13500hx system, no speed issues
@@BudgetBuildsOfficialgog specifically fixes problems like that.
I turn 27 this year and the whole laptop as a tv thing is still super relevant for me in the year of our Lord 2025. When I'm out in a hotel for work, I immediately unhook whatever cable or satellite tv service is plugged into the hotel room TV and plug in my laptop instead. Wireless mouse and keyboard and its a dream not being forced to watch boring normal tv when RUclips is 100% of what I watch.
This brought back a lot of good memories, thank you man :)
from someone who is still using a 14 year old laptop just fine with no performance issues, I think we have reached a point where technology progress has slowed down significantly to affect performance significantly, I cant wait for a time when 20 year old laptops will still be usable for daily use. If you install Linux on that machine maybe add a gig of ram if there if space for it i think it can be comfortable for daily use.
Cute foxy at the end, very chonky
This is the kind of budget gaming I subbed for lol
I found this one to be amongst the best looking laptops I have seen. Any era.
That huge screen looking that crisp and clear and that old was certainly an eye opener. The gloss surface you so carefully buffed back to its high gloss self added much to its attraction for me, too bad it will be an absolute finger print magnet.
Value here is very evident to me. You did nothing to it outside of a surface clean and it ran away with everything you threw at it. Well, ran 'OKay' with everything you threw at it. Still I loved it. A banger as they say. Run of 6. Home run. Pushover try. A hat trick. Perhaps my sports metaphors are lacking but you done good, bub.
Thnks again.
I absolutely love your content dude, keep up the uploads, you have a loyal fan base
This laptop is a treasure!
1) Look at how good it looks and how well - preserved it is!
2) It`s amazing how a SINGLE core can run this thing so effortlessly!
3) it`s the cheapest, really? That laptop is for keepers, for sure!
I always enjoy and wait for.............the benchmarks!
I've said this before, but man, your enthusiasm is so darn refreshing and fun! As for these older laptops, they have been super under-the-radar for a while now, and I've grabbed quite a few of these (not the exact machine, but very similar) and they've ranged from a Sony Vaio VGN-FW11M for £7.50 which was bundled with an MSI laptop, which is a great little gaming laptop, all the way to a Dell Latitude 610 that I got for about £15 which needed a new screen. These are so underappreciated, and they will skyrocket in the future, in my humble opinion. :D
Good chance that slot the remote sits in is in fact still an expansion slot as well as being the primary storage for the remote.
yay, fox!! As for the laptop, I love the aesthetic of it too, the black/silver two-tone and blue LEDs.
This guy is my top guy for PC tech in general 😊 well done i love your vids
Similarly to the Acer Gaming/Media Laptop you reviewed some years ago with the Pentium 4. Funny enough during the first year or so of Covid a family member picked up some PS4s, Xbox Ones & an Acer Gaming/Media Laptop (2007-2008.) I tested the consoles and they worked, the laptop was a AMD Athlon 64 cpu variant of the one you checked out with a 17' screen and a dual hard drive internal caddy. It is a beast at running Windows XP 32 Bit, one of my favorite things is picking these up and seeing what the 2000 - 2013 laptops can do since many people overlook platforms ripe and very fast for XP. AM3 & AM3+ is a very good platform for Windows XP gaming on the cheap.
3:57 singer/producer legend justin timbaland
I know, when I heard that I died! LOL
Thank you for leaving this comment! I was so sad that nobody else noticed it when scrolling through the other replies that I was about to say it myself.
I always wanted one of those SLI laptops. Buddy had one ages ago when they were new and burned a hole in his mattress with it lol.
Hi, i wanted to Tell you, i Love your Videos, this relaxed way with the Jazz music Always makes me enjoy my time while i Grind items in Games or Just sit in front of my PC and have Lunch. 👍
My first modern pc was a Packard Bell back in 99, haven't seen one for >20 years. My first home computer was a zx81 followed by a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A.
So seeing a PB laptop is a blast from the past and Windows xp was fantastic for the time.
That remote control is something that seems a bit weird now but at the start of the millennium there was some strange ideas with computers back then. But after seeing this I wish I could afford one cause it looks great. Tough times atm so I'll have to wait. Great video though... 👏🏻
I really like the way you make videos entertaining and they always make me happy , thanks a lot❤️
Very happy to see a relatable video, you uploaded this while I was playing Sims 1 on my Compaq Presario V3000, It has an AMD Turion 64 1 CORE @ 2GHz, 3gbs RAM and GeForce Go 6150 64mb.
I was hoping I would be able to play Halo on mine but it runs terribly even on lowest setting at 800x600
Edit: Also running Windows 7 Pro lightened abit so that's probably a factor in the lacking game performance perhaps?
A Friday evening Budget-Builds treat-what a nice surprise! I didn’t expect a remote with that laptop. The last time I saw a remote with something PC-related was with my old Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty. And that chonky fox at the end? Adorable bonus!
Yay!!! Another budget-built video!!!
You got me missing my old HP Pavilion laptop from that era. I was in the Navy so I needed a portable system in those days...
I love the look of it honestly.
I love when you’re looking through the files of the previous owner. Real Dankpods vibes. Do it more!
Happy new year mate
With those specs, I bet this machine would be a stunning Windows 98SE gaming machine.
I may warn you: Please disable the autodubbing feature in your RUclips Studio settings, the automatic dubs are AI-generated and will contain tons of mistakes, and viewers are more comfortable watching your video as-is, not with some AI talking over your voice.
Viewers aren’t forced into listening to the AI version. It might be useful for non-english speaking people
@pikaaxytit kinda is, but (good) subtitles are better than a weird robotic voice that trashes the audio entirely. For a long time I only spoke spanish and subtitles were quite better than a dub, (obviously youtube dubs weren't a thing back then, but think of shows) but nowadays, on youtube, subtitles only work if they aren't AI subtitles or lazy transcriptions that cut off the
sentence at the.
Wrong moments and by result, break the translation entirely.
Totally remember these "desktop replacements" from the 2000s :)
it's so cool seeing the retro laptops you can get on some parts of the world, I have got a SIM+ 1062 (Positivo) with a Pentium T3400 and a SIS M672 for free recently, which's almost that, but unfortunately it can barely run GTA Vice City or Half Life 2, despite being a 2009 laptop, all thanks to the "mighty" SIS... It doesn't even support DirectX9 fully.
The fun thing IS the gma can play GTA vice city just fine.
@DonMr yeah, GMA is A LOT better than SIS crap... Positivo never fails to disappoint (the manufacturers of this laptop).
You can change the CPU on your laptop, this generation is really good for this! The best you can use is the T7800. Need to check is the bios will be ok (cpu id and bios version).
@@antoinedrela794 I can, but I can't change the GPU, and the GPU is the bottleneck for everything on this laptop, that Pentium can run a lot more, but the only games I did run "decently" were on software render mode, or really, REALLY old stuff...
@@ToniaGlitched I have the same problem on my laptop, i changed the CPU for a better but the gpu is the weak point (Mobility Radeon HD 3450 512Mo). But at least i can play PS1 games with DuckStation. My laptop is from 2009, HP DV5 1210ef.
I love laptops and PCs like this.
I often find them at flea market for like $5-7 a pop. Sometimes they work sometimes not lol
This really makes me miss the simple days of PC gaming. You didn't need AI upsampling, ray tracing, VRR(okay, gsync existed but no one really cared about it), black frame insertion, or any of that other stuff. You just needed a machine that played game good. I loved my ol' Athlon 64 laptop with Radeon x600 graphics. It ran Quake 4 perfectly, and that was all I needed.
If you aren't getting at least 240fps @ 8K then what are you even doing with your life
Simple days of PC gaming the early 2000s? I beg to differ. The last time PC gaming was simple was the mid 1980s. IMO of course.
@ As long as you don't try to go past the 640k memory limit.
how much of your life do you want to live without raytracing?
@ 640K limit wasn't a thing in the mid 80s. Most games were still fine with half that.
Media-center (like) laptops were HUGE deal! I had used Toshiba or perhaps PB in early 2010s with full 3.5" HDD bay and could be booted as cd/dvd player. Quite nostalgic, but glad that era is long gone.
I had one of those HP media laptops with a similar remote, it wasn't a gaming laptop, it was for music and movies, the remote controlled Windows Media Player. I did have a few RTS's on it though back in the day, but the backlight failed on it after a few years and that was that. I loved messing with that little remote though.
Packard Bell made some great computers! And I love playing Fable TLC on older PCs.
I still have my childhood Dell XPS M1710, and it holds a special place in my heart. Like many XPS models, the GPU eventually gave out, leaving it unusable for years. Recently, I decided to replace the dead GPU with a refurbished one, and now I’m reliving my childhood, playing all those retro games buttery smooth. The M1710 is truly a gaming beast, but of course, I keep an eye on the heat with apps like HWMonitor or SpeedFan, just to make sure it doesn’t overheat again 😆
Memories that will stay in my mind forever (computer technician and technology enthusiast since I was 8 years old and I am 25 years old)😊
Raptor call of the shadows was amazing
I had an HP laptop back in college that came with a remote like that and I used the remote quite often. I had a USB TV tuner that I used with Windows Media Center to watch cable TV that was provided in the dorms.
I did something similar recently... a bit of a cheat, but I got an Asus G2S laptop. Vista era, but came with Windows XP drivers. So it's my XP machine.
So this laptop is more of a Packard Belle than a Packard Bell-End. Nice video.
I was inspired by this video, and took to eBay to look for my own cheap Windows XP "gaming" laptop. I had forgotten that Packard Bell wasn't really a thing here in the United States during the 2000s, (funnily enough, my very first PC was a Packard Bell desktop that I purchased in 1993 or so). I did manage to snag one for $15, one of those "as-is" deals. I THINK it's a Packard Bell EasyNote Butterfly S with a dual Intel graphics card and a Radeon HD 4330. Screen is 1366x768. Seems like it should be perfect for XP era games. I don't think it will run Crysis well, but who knows. It also has 4 GBs of RAM. Not bad for $15!
Bargain that, enjoy!
Brilliant. We have a Packard Bell laptop running XP (Core 2 Duo T5200, 2GB DDR2, 160GB IDE disk) and it doesn't run games as well as that due to having Intel GMA.
Not sure about whether your hard drive is IDE or SATA but you can definitely have 2GB DDR2.
I'm also not surprised about the 0 minute battery life. Those PBs were well known for having batteries that died, and you couldn't get replacements either.
I'm planning to get a dell optiplex 380 desktop which has windows 7 but i have a hard drive with Windows xp on it só i will install the drive to the dell
Also the very old laptops, especially the cheap one doesn't have any battery protection/charge limiter, that has be careful not to leave it plugged in for too long while it's fully charged or otherwise the battery cells will be damaged very quickly
I enjoyed using the Delta game manager for my ePSXe games. The laptop was great for it, for the time. Ran FFIX quite well, along with all my old Win9x games, without the GeForce. Pentium M was a very specific epoch of computing, and it got me through undergraduate college.
You've gained a sub 👍
I have a HP dv9000 series laptop running a GeForce Go GPU. Ended up upgrading the CPU and went to dual booting 64-bit XP and Vista. It's a fun retro laptop gaming experience when working within what it can play best. Having a large display and being able to do custom refresh rates to force 120hz is very nice. These laptop are weirdly special
I have a Fujitsu XA2528 I got for free, that thing is great. Best speakers I ever heard on a laptop too.
One of my favourite laptops was an HP DV5T that was like this laptop -- multimedia touch controls, an internal remote control, great speakers -- it's crazy how we've gone backwards in features.
This is so good for an Windows XP laptop, i can imagine how expensive it was when it was released
Mind boggling how snappy this thing is!
The Packard Bell!!
Just bought old T61 for retor gaming. It works great and its fun...
This reminded me to pull out my MBP4.1 and get XP set up on it again.
I had a few Packard bell back in the day and they cpus were always upgradeable
This is quite a fascinating find because at least here in North America, Packard Bell is not a name you associated with higher end products.
Packard Bell was not seen as a high end brand here in Europe either, just like with Medion and Compaq they usually was the budget friendly computers you could get in stores. Sure PB had a few higher priced products but the brand was mostly known for being cheapily built and well cheap. They also tried their hand on gaming computers with the iPower product line, don't think it sold well because it didn't last long before the iPower line disappeared.
You missed out on the most reasonable use for this...
Downgrade to Win98.
It's a single-core CPU, with a 6000 series GPU... That is literally the most perfect candidate for a maxed out Win98se retro rig.
I suspect that drivers wouldn't be very good, though. If you've watched MattKC's video on trying to make the fastest Windows 98 machine, you'll know what I mean.
Before watching this, I had never heard of a Windows XP Gaming laptop. I didn’t know that was a thing!
And now all those laptops of that particular model are "sold out" is my guess xD
Usually happens after about 34 hours from BB releasing a video.
Same happens when LGR and other retro tubers release a video. xD
Yeah, that's definitely happening. Need to find an even shonkier brand than Packard Bell now. If there even is one.... 😂😂😂
yep, they're gone, if there were any on ebay still anyways.
probably they weren't many on sale, I will stick with Alienware SLI gaming laptop
12:54 "celeron"?
Laptops used to be so cool! I LOVE the included Remote Control and the fact it has dedicated graphics. Very impressed by this laptop especially for the price.
During the background of testing the games I have the EXACT same tiles of flowers in our kitchen at my parents house!!
Not game worthy... but one of those HEY I HAVE THOSE moments haha
This laptop is beautiful.
I remember these! A friend used to have one and at the time it was sooo cool. Also, makes you wonder what went wrong with OS software engineering in general if you have practically all the features you can think of in the footprint of win xp, when today 4gb of ram is the vrry bare minimum.
That and I loved the fox cameo. Cute fella.
I still got a 2004-ish IBM thinkpad, with similar specs a Pentium and ATI graphics. Lovely machine.
We need moreeeee laptop content!
Sounds like it's got that good ole' Dothan core Pentium M Centrino. That was a WONDERFUL platform, power and performance wise. And the kicker was it didn't make much heat either.
My Compaq Evo N610 has been utterly brilliant, runs Halo fine.
went to a used computer store the other month and the guy was super cool in there, had the biggest windows vista acer gaming laptop I have ever seen. Guy didn't have the adapter I needed in stock but we got to talking and he worked out I liked to tinker with old stuff. Anyway, he wound up just giving me a pentium M NEC laptop and a another laptop that was filly dead. But the NEC I installed alpine linux to and it works pretty nice. I just have to find more ram since it only has a half gig and that really cant do much.
I have a Windows Vista laptop Toshiba Satellite P300 with 4GB RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 2.00GHz processor and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 graphics card.
It ran Halo: Combat Evolved very terribly, same thing on Linux (Arch, because Debian couldn't do hardware acceleration for some reason), battery life was OK around an hour plus on Linux it'd suddenly shut down around 70% charge and I'd have to wait a little to be able to use the laptop past that.
Installing XP on it made it run like a dream, gaming performance and battery life improved drastically.
These were so damn expensive back in the day, as a teenager it felt unbelievable someone could drop such money for a laptop, but now as an adult it feels almost like a pocket money.
Go easssyyyyy on those old hinges lol
your opening it like its a factory new laptop 😆
HP sold a model with a remote control. It was a “Windows Media Center” kind of a home TV vibe.
Have a happy new year Budget-Builds Official
There is more that can be done, there is pata SSDs, custom low resource usage, tweaking services and of course can always set performance mode to on and task priority to realtime. These would help to get a little bit more performance out of the Xp laptop. Increasing capacity speed and CS latency would aid with it a bit too
Pentium M's and the Yonah architecture (including Core Duo) are the absolute peak of 32-bit processing.
A 2010 MacBook Unibody makes for a great Windows XP gaming laptop. It's a bit finicky to get all the drivers working, but when it's finished, it's the best of retro and modern
I still have my Inspiron 8600 with a 1.1 GHZ pentium M and ATI 9700 and it f@cking slays old games
I recently picked up a Compaq R3140 with a Athlon 64 and a GeForce4 Go. My first laptop that I could somewhat properly call a XP gaming laptop
I have the same but in NEC variant and 15". Radeon 9600 in it, got it for free in an electronic dump.
I don't think I recall seeing Packard Bell laptops during the Windows XP era where I live. Dell, Compaq, HP, Toshiba...etc. sure, but not Packard Bell. I mostly knew them for their cheap, bloatware-filled desktops in the 90s.
C&C Generals mentioned!!
Another thing people dont think about are AMD's original APU's, the A4, A6, and A8 3000 series, and A4, A6, A8, A10 5000 and 6000 series. All work in XP and provide decent performance, the original 3000 Llano series were some excellent overclockers. You could boost their clocks by like 50%, and actually get better performance, and battery life if you dialed in the right settings.
My "first" computer, the family computer my mom and I put together with an emachines case, power supply, disk drives and an IDE drive that was under 20 gigs that my grandpa gave us. We went and got a new motherboard and presumably a pentium from circuit city. I was about 7 in 2003 so I do not recall much about the machine other than taking an hour or more to download a single incorrectly labelled song from bearshare on dial-up.
I remember get my free xp gaming laptop in 2023 a acer Ferrari 3000 water damaged i used for some stuff for a year but sadly gave it away to my collage who does a course on computer hardwere we had a tear down of the devive before i said goodbye because i didn’t need it anymore as it was sitting in a pile of unused laptops
Thinkpad T41s as gaming laptops? What a world we live in... I used to use one at work for talking to trains...
my old 2011 laptop couldn't run HL2 like this
really impressive
I remember converting a Celeron laptop to a core 2 duo from a dead Sony Vaio was a Toshiba Satellite with Vista Basic that I downgraded to XP SP2, it may have had intel graphics but it ran UT99 and the classic Serious Sam games fine which I was perfectly happy with
So many good quality well written games that could function well back then out of the box........I'd like to say "wow, look how far we've come" but we haven't, we have honestly gone backwards.
God, hearing the word FRAPS takes me back.
Pretty sweet looking laptop, the previous owner(s) definitely took care of it, or at least properly stored it.
Thats pretty impressive for an old laptop
I’ve just recently picked up a dell studio 1537 for my win xp gaming that has a core 2 duo, 4gigs of ram and a Radeon hd3450 for £19 😁
I had a Packard Bell EasyNote a Celeron M I think about 1.5ghz with 1GB of RAM in about... ooh 2009, 2010 ish, and my primary memory of it was how hellish it was to find drivers for it when I reinstalled. Easily the biggest hassle I've ever had getting a computer running.
Rare second person appearance at the end 😲
I have a Packard Bell desktop PC sitting in my basement. It came with a Pentium MMX 233MHz CPU, 32MB of RAM, and... absolutely no L2 cache on the motherboard. They truly were trying to meet a spec sheet with as little money as possible. I heard that Packard Bell went out of business, at least here in the US, because they won a contract with Microsoft to build PCs for development purposes and used refurbished parts in some of the builds, while all new components was a stipulation of the contract. You can imagine Microsoft's lawyers having a field day with that one.