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“I have been running the Packard Bell C3300 laptop as...”

written by derred on 20/06/2006

Good Points
Great screen (I only use it on the lowest setting), very comfortable(especially the keyboard feel and touchpad drivers that allow gestures), well designed rescue disk with a nice software selection(initially a partition but you can copy it to a disk and get 4GB back)

Bad Points
Initially the battery only lasted about 2h and now lasts 1h (more like 45 minutes), Tends to overheat if the air hole underneath is covered

General Comments
I have been running the Packard Bell C3300 laptop as my main machine(at least 16h a day) for over a year and have only had two problems with it, one of which was my own fault:

1. Needed extra RAM(but then again who doesn't)

2. Got a USB WLAN card

3. The laptop was overheating because of my putting it on the bed for 16h a day and covering the exhaust port underneath.



Memmory Modifications:

Since I've had it I've added the 512MB of RAM that the system was able to accept and am now able to do most of my computing on it.



Processor Power:

The AMD Athlon 2600+ Mobile that the machine comes with is actually the mobile version of the AMD Barton 2600+ and a decent performer.



Video Velocity(couldn't think of any other word to start with 'V'):

While the video card is not great, when set to share 64 MB of the system's RAM it suited all my needs. I must mention that since it is not ATI of Nvidia and most new games have some issues with it but I have been able to play games such as Morrowind, Flight Simulator 2004, Arx Fatalis, Need For Speed 5, 6, 7, 8 even Crashday with decent framerates (and medium details).

Also worth a mention is the fact that I've run Blender perfectly on the machine and rendering times aren't horrible (about what you'd expect+2 seconds for a 1600x1200 JPG image)



Sound (of) Silence:

The sound is decent and the soundcard doesn't stutter even on full load but there is one thing I've noticed: the overall volume is too low. And while the 15 inch screen playes movies like a dream you need headphones of external speakers to enjoy the loud sounds of an action film (of course that assumes you enjoy loud sounds).

You can run Adobe Audition 1.5 (2.0 does not work because of the lack of SSE) and Sibelius 4 (the latest version at the time of writing).



Connectivity Conundrum

The laptop comes very well equiped with Modem, Ethernet and Firewire, but no wireless. At the time I bought it I was interested in the IEEE 1394 Firewire port than a wireless card so that I only recently got the wireless adapter.

I can say that I use the Laptop do do all of my downloads, in fact it is the only computer I have that is connected to the Internet. It has run without problems downloading 16h a day, and that is when I didn't forget to turn it off.



Overall Overview(a bit redundant I know):

Really really well built machine. No qualms with it whatsoever. If you're planning to get a decent machine to use for office work and maybe a bit of casual gaming on the side it's perfect.

The battery might be a downside but I don't use it that much, and anyway, even if I play a demanding 3d game on it, it still lasts for about 45 minutes (and that's after over a year, aproximatly 500 cycles from full to empty).