LGR - Restoring a Packard Bell 955 Computer

I cherish each and every one.

LGR

Moar will be made!

LGR

Right? It's one of the ideal computers to display late-90s mediocrity.

LGR

Haha, now that would be a trip down memory lane, with a detour on awful avenue.

LGR

I always uninstall it.

LGR

If you're serious then, well, I guess I was a bit too quick to dismiss the usefulness of the tutorial program :P

LGR

so jealous you have (another) PC that runs pod :o

Peter Metzger

Back in my work-experience days I had a boss who hated Packard Bell desktops. But one of my cousins had one and I remember playing Duke 3D on that. Ahhh, nostalgic memories of avoiding drunks watching the AFL.

Ois

I love this project videos! Moar, please!

iCach0

I love the aesthetic of this machine. It's so standard and white and 90s.

Nostalgia Nerd

Always hesitant about telling people about the jumper for clearing the password. It always felt like a kind of in-house secret with IT users. They're still there even on the newest desktops. Which knowledge of makes locking down your system in case of theft almost impossible. Unless it's a laptop anyway.

SuperBunnyBun

Make an Episode on 90's bloatware!

Awesome product key, gotta try that sometime! It sounds *gassy* :)

My first PC was an ASI T-Bird, a pre-built 386 SX which didn't have the best components, but it looked awesomely 90s. It came with a weird custom DOS shell where one could directly start the pre-installed games, Monkey Island 2 and Mad TV.

Renzo Thönen

I really like the idea of restoring even the crap computers. It gives a sense of importance to the flood of crap coming marketwise.

avfusion

What are your thoughts on Norton, especially for those computers of that period? I found that it literally screwed up every PC that it was ever installed on and yet, somehow everyone kept on using it. Was it just me or did others have that experience?

Gary Leigh

Brings back the nightmares of computers of that time. I always opted to build my own but there were so many dodgy parts out there. It was just how it was.

Gary Leigh

Well thank you Packard Bell I learnt something. I use Calculator every day didn't ever occur to me to hit view and see that it converts units. I was using Google!

Shapey Fiend

That bloatware.... holy crap so much bloatware. D8

The Enforcer

Always gotta have the Doom. And the Keen. And the Duke3D more often than not

LGR

Well that's unusual, I wonder if it kicked in some kind of 3D acceleration. It does have the capability!

LGR

"""QUIET"""

LGR

It really is the ideal average PC from late '98

LGR

Thanks for the info!

LGR

It's not a LGR video like this without testing DOOM.. I always enjoy these videos..

John Madigan

It was a toss up in my area in the US. Lots of shops put together PCs but sometimes you just wanted a company with a phone number. My dad always bought us a used computer when local businesses were upgrading so we got IBMs and Compaqs. My first laptop which was a Pentium II Compaq used to run a server for the NCAA in fact.

Contreramanjaro

Mmmm. I'd love to have my old Compaq Deskpro just to hear the whir of the fans and the clacking of the floppy drive. It had a very quite floppy drive compared to most of the other PCs I had used and it seemed pretty fast. I even had a video memory expansion in it, well that my dad had put in it.

Contreramanjaro

A friend of mine back in the late 90s had a computer just like this one and I remember it having some... "odd" compatibility issues. For instance, my friend had a flight combat game, I think something with A-10s, and it was running a horrible framerate at a low resolution. So while he's in the bathroom I decide to tinker with the settings, I turn it UP from 320x240 to 640x480 and suddenly, instead of a framerate of 6 we've got a framerate of 30! :O

Kris Asick

"quiet". Ain't that the truth.

David Rickard

Nice!!! :D

floverSaeu09

I love to restore old PCs. Sadly I don't have the budget for it anymore (thanks ebay scalpers), but I'm always glad to relive it through your videos. :)

Maximilien Noal

A PC that is perfectly below average in practically every way.

Matthew Dooley

I recall fixing a couple of these PB towers around late 2000, had mostly the same kind of problems - dead power supplies, noisy CPU fans, dying/dead HDDs and CD-ROMS. One got upgraded with a Lite-On DVD-RW drive, 20 gig WD HDD, 250 watt Enermax PSU and a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI (and it's still working, too ^^). The issue with Commander Keen is pretty common with ATI GPUs from this era and there's no real way to fix it. The Rage 2C is capable of 3D rendering but doesn't have enough video memory for most 3D games (4mb was the minimum required back then) and lacks a number of hardware features, most notably no Z-buffering and no means to disable Vsync.

Also, install Windows me :)

Robert Launder

Never had a prebuilt desktop, nice to see what crap they came with preinstalled and what i avoided in my youth. First thing what i would have done to that system would have been a fresh clean install, just as i do with every notebook i had since ever. BTW: Could it be that the US was mainly a pre-build and we Germans where mainly a small shop/homebrew land for PCs in the 90s?

BastetFurry

What a BUNCH of bloatware.

That thing reminds me of an eMachines I had. The inside looks practically identical, though it was newer with a Celeron and Windows me.

Robert Launder

Bulky rainbow-shaped bloatware launchers FTW

J.R. Williams

love the vid btw

Wallace Fung Wooh Sheen

Hey LGR, completely unrelated to the video, what is your opinion on the rise of loot boxes and microtransaction in single player focused game?

Wallace Fung Wooh Sheen

I, too, smashed my old Packard Bell with a hammer. And set it on fire. I was all too happy to be rid of it at the time. Much regret.

LGR

When we built our first pc based on parts from a computer show at a hotel, we took a sledgehammer to the mid 90s packard bell it replaced. It felt good. I think we kept the cdrom.

Jessie Cook

Glad you enjoyed it! An MX 400 is a bit newer than I have in mind for this late 90s machine, but not out of the question either. I'd be curious to see how far I can push this thing with GPU upgrades alone, even those well into the 2000s.

LGR

Amazing video! On the note of upgrades, a GeForce MX 400 would be right on the 'low budget, high ambitions' ethos of that build, IMO. Also, amazing woodgrain toothbrush... And hope those band-aids on your left hand aren't from something too painfull! Thank you very much for the upload!

LJFox

Yeah these are fun and give me an excuse to finish projects like this I've had hanging around for years :)

LGR

Another PC restoration? You're spoiling us! <3

Yep, everything was original until I upgraded the things shown in the video. These later PB systems were made under the watch of NEC and featured more generic hardware and software, so the generic BIOS isn't surprising.

LGR

Is the BIOS original? I didn't see a Packard Bell logo or anything PB related on it.

Steve Lovelace

Woohoo another video!

Mukul Kewalramani