Packard Bell Easy Note R0422 Review - What I Don't Like About This Notebook
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The speakers are tinny, and they sounded like the diaphragms were torn after just four weeks (note that the diaphragms were not torn, it just sounded like they were). The output of the speakers make it useless for movie watching or listening to music over any distance further than three feet away. Apart from the terrible sound out put of this particular lap top, the very cool looking touch pad is peeling off! This is only in its third month of use.
The laptop is not recommended for desert warfare, it looks (and is) relatively delicate. Some of the faults cannot be attributed to the cost alone. Some Gateway notebooks are just slightly higher in price, with the same specifications, and don't have the faults that I attribute to this laptop.
Guides, Support and Other Reviews
If you know pieces of hardware, you know you always have support forums and online guides, right? Wrong. This particular gizmo has no online documentation (seriously). The full documentation is only available on the laptop (Info center), so formatting your hard disk may not be recommended if you want to know how to modify this Packard Bell machine. Packard Bell is in bed with the normal host of mates, Microsoft, AOL and British Telecom, so all three requested some form of voluntary registration for everything ranging from updates to ISP subscription. Packard Bell has some information on Easy Notes.
Apart from a few laptop sites (surprising nobody is selling this gizmo on eBay yet), there is scarcely any other information on this laptop. The Easy Note R0422 seems to be heavily ignored by most of the reviewing community. The only other review is this one written by my colleague on a techblog. He no longer uses that nice shiny laptop any more, reverting back to his Alienware Area 51-m (the Alienware people seem to be forming their own cult). The shiny laptop gets stuck on the office desk and gets carted off by anybody who wants to do presentations to clients outside the office (in other words, marketing types).
Packard Bell Tomorrow
After being voted #1 worst PC brand in the nineties on PC World, how will John Hui's recent purchase fare in a low cost environment dominated by Acer (who overtook Toshiba recently)? Is there any hope of these ancient brands of the nineties staging a come back anywhere else but good old Europe? AST, Packard Bell and eMachines have not attracted the big two (HP and Dell) despite their catering to the low end note book market.
I doubt Packard Bell will be called the worst brand of this decade, though it might earn the title of "most boring." Obviously there was some skimping on materials, which is, alas, common nowadays in so many products. The skimping make this laptop less rugged than I would have wished. But for the new laptop user, or for people on a strict budget who want world class processors at a bargain price (engineering students should note that the Sempron processor is pretty good at mathematical iterations), this lap top is it, but it is definitely not a classic.
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