Packard Bell C3300

The Packard Bell C3300 laptop in my opinion has a very poor battery life, especially when considering its competitors. It does have a very good screen but for the money I would recommend a different laptop.

The Packard Bell C3300 is the best laptop I've ever had -I will be getting a new one soon but this has served me brilliantly over the last 3 years and it is still going strong - I rate it 10 out 10!

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).

The Packard Bell C3300 is a great little laptop with a fantastic quality screen and graphics.

I've had mine for aboout 5 months and the battery life has decreased from 1.2 hours and now only lasts about 20 minutes. It has no floppy disk drive which also means you can't run a battery refresh disk.

On the other hand, it is light weight and a neat little machine for gaming and business with superb graphics although they cannot run games with graphics that require high power graphics cards. Good RAM and fully uprgadalbe to nearly 1 GB of RAM. 40 Gb Hdd and some great pre loaded software.

Highly recommended for people who enjoy gaming and people who need it for business.