Packard Bell Support Older Models
Hasan Fogg
This might sounds ridiculous, but I need some help finding the model of an old computer i used to own. I know what the computer looks like. It was made by Packard Bell, but i can't find hardly any information on older packard bell computers anywhere online. I got the computer around 1999, give or take a couple of years. It came with Windows 98 preinstalled. It was a tower desktop. I was wondering if anyone knows of a website or reference tool where i can find some information on older model desktop computers.
HI I have a new Telus packard bell flip phone. I am not sure how to transfer my Photos and music off of my samsung cell phone so I can transfer this stuff to my new cell phone. The reason I am trying this is because on the homepage of my new cell phone it says Telus. I am wondering is their any free no charge software to transfer this stuff to the Telus packard bell flip phone.
Telus doesn't actually sell a Packard Bell flip phone. No Canadian carrier does. The only flip phone Telus currently offers is the Alcatel one. The Alcatel one is actually lower in price than that Packard Bell phone.
The only websites that come up for a Packard Bell flip phones are Walmart Canada and a wholesaler. No other sites list that specific phone and model. Walmart copied the description from a wholesaler website word for word. The description on Walmart's website for that phone labels all carriers in Canada as "3G GSM" which is incorrect.
Packard Bell was bought by Acer back in 2008. The original Packard Bell website is dead and broken. The Packard Bell name now seems to be used by a Russian company, Southern Telecom. At least according to Packard Bell USA's website. PB USA has no cell phones listed anywhere on their site. If you dig into Southern Telecom's website, there is a support page with a basic user guide for the A300PB flip phone. It should have been in the box with the phone. Southern Telecom doesn't even offer that phone for sale or have it on their main site. Only the support page.
The phone appears incapable of data transfers from an old phone. It is using a custom operating system. You could try putting data on a microSD card and putting it into the flip phone but because it's a dead brand and not one supported in Canada, good luck.
The first Windows-based PC I was introduced to in the early-1990s was a Packard Bell Legend 660 or comparable. It had the Microsoft Entertainment Pack 2 bundle featuring Rodent's Revenge and Rattler Race, two games I grew very fond of and would later develop a few games and variants heavily inspired by that. In that era I'd often ride my bike to the local Radio Shack to top the scores on their demonstration computers.
Decades later, I still appreciate that creative age of desktop computing even if these systems are collectively referred to as "Packard Hell" by select groups. At some point in time I found a Packard Bell Platinum Pro 750/755 tower on the curb to giveaway. I brought it back and eventually set it up in another retro corner. Since I planned to use it as an intermediary machine for creating and archiving old floppy media, I swapped out the Iomega zip drive with a 5.25" drive instead, knowing I also have some external ZIP drives if ever needed (although zip disks were short-lived and notoriously prone to click-of-death failure).
Packard Bell sells more home computers than anyone in the world, and we're #1 in America, too. We make powerful machines that are easy to use, at a great price. Packard Bell Platinum Series models are the Ultimate Internet Machine with our Direct Internet Access and loads of new hardware and software enhancements.
Packard Bell HelpDesk technicians can dial into your computer, diagnose, and in many cases, fix your computer while talking to you on the same phone line! Our one-year limited warranty includes one-year on-site service. Telephone support is available 24 hours-a-day, 365 days-a-year.
Multimedia video had long been a marketing strategy with Packard Bell to home consumers. In 1992, they bundled Intel's early video codecs with their Windows 3.1 desktop computers and touted some of the first consumer-level full motion video capabilities. To further sell this point, I discovered this 10MB video file floating around a Packard Bell Legend 610 (back when hard drives were only 60-200 MB, so the video itself took up a decent chunk of it):
The tuner card contained in the Platinum Pro series included a coaxial input for cable/antenna signals as well as an S-Video input for an external video source. The computer's video out supported a standard VGA connector or a composite video signal, so it could be hooked to a very large array of monitors and CRTs. I don't recall many systems after 1996 supporting a composite video out, many opted strictly for VGA or, at times with external GPUs, S-Video out for secondary displays.
This was also the era when sound cards and CD-ROM drives had dedicated audio connections so that you could funnel music CDs directly into the sound card output, which was pretty cool including in select DOS and early Windows titles that allowed you to play a music CD and have it integrate into the game as a soundtrack. The sound card in this set doubled as a 33.6 Kbps fax/modem.
Packard Bell systems tend to ship with some white label or proprietary devices that can make tracking down drivers or software support a complicated effort. This is compounded by the many different iterations of their hardware, driver and software packages and the multitude of master CDs and recovery disks as will be discussed in a bit. The front of this Packard Bell still has a label advertising its original hardware bundle.
I've semi-lost track of what components I swapped or which ones were upgraded prior to my acquisition, and which are still original. For the sake of completeness here is a rundown of all the hardware that my Platinum Pro 755 currently contains. At some other point I also had a Platinum Pro 750 with motherboard and CMOS problems; the sets were nearly identical except some 750s contained only 24 MB of RAM or slightly lower specs.
One of the problems that plagued my Packard Bell since the beginning was that it had numerous device failures, conflicts and software problems on the OS (Windows 95A). Since some of the cards in this system are so obscure and also included Packard Bell exclusive software, I found it most appropriate to seek out the master CD to do a complete system recovery and factory reset. This proved much more difficult than I would had liked.
Over the decades of upgrading computers and buying or building new ones, I rarely gave a second thought to the system CDs so they often wound up tossed or lost. In hindsight I recognize now that these discs contained a lot of history to them including sometimes specialized software or utilities that may not be readily available online. This is certainly true for the Packard Bell line of systems, each of which used a unique master CD containing a particular strain of software, operating system configurations and driver support.
A tremendous number of Packard Bell models and revisions were released through the early-2000s, but the master CDs were often discarded or at least never digitized. You can find a handful of them for sale on eBay every so often but with pretty steep ask prices of $20 or more per disc. As usual, I turned to archive.org to attempt location of a master recovery disc that'd likely accommodate my Platinum Pro 750/755. Even this proved complicated with a lot of dead ends.
Despite the seemingly endless number of Packard Bell models released to market, not a lot of matching recovery discs ever made their way online. Packard Bell's own website used to house a large array of software and drivers for their 1990s machines but all of that went away when their ownership and site was overhauled, and few if any of those files were archived. Searching around Google you'll sometimes find old threads with a few dumps to random long-expired file share websites. The other problem with Packard Bell master CDs is they were cryptically labeled and numbered and it is often difficult to pinpoint which hardware they target. PBPlanet contains a decent list of master CD build numbers to help locate ones similar to the timeline of your system.
Circling back to archive.org, the user KainiaKaria graciously uploaded around 16 master CDs from 1995 through 1998, including one specific to the Platinum Pro series from January 1997, which was approximately when my system was released. My goal was to get Windows 95 OSR2 ("950 B") operational, since the original instance on the hard drive was 950 A and thus lacked more integral USB support and other enhancements. There are thankfully an increasing number of other images floating around, too. Be warned that some dumps may be corrupt or incomplete. I discovered one in particular has had every byte of every file nullified to 00 (at least when extracted in normal ways as needed to modify batch files before burning). Therefore, even though the file sizes all look ordinary, the files themselves did nothing.
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