My recollection of the time was that someone would go to the store and come home with a Packard Bell bundle — a desktop multimedia PC, keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Everything was thin plastic. The industrial design of the PC was actually kind of interesting, but the flimsy gray cosmetic panels exuded cheapness. The mouse weighed nothing and felt like it would crack open when clicked too hard. The monitor was fuzzy and flickered, because the dot pitch was awful and it couldn’t run at high refresh rates. So initial impressions weren’t great.

And then I would get asked to help set up the sound card and modem. That’s where my hatred came from. They used Aztech sound cards — which, shockingly, today have a decent reputation. I have not, myself, recovered from that experience, but I guess they’re technically not that bad. I mostly remember them being quirky and hard to get working. My Sound Blaster Pro … you set the jumpers (if they even needed to be changed), installed the software, and off you went. On the Aztech, maybe you got one that had that “EEPROM or Software” jumper that selected whether it would be configured at boot by a driver, or used the settings that were previously programmed. That was a whole layer of confusion that nobody asked for.

Then, what card do you even have? The NX? The NX Pro? The NX Pro Extra? The NX Pro 16? The NX Pro 16 Extra? The Pro 16? The Multimedia Pro 16? The Multimedia Pro 16V? AGGGGHHH It wouldn’t have been a problem if it didn’t matter, but it did. The software wasn’t universal, and the drivers would sometimes load, but wouldn’t work quite right. Maybe it wouldn’t set the IRQ correctly and your Windows startup sound would loop infinitely, or it would lock up. I hated those cards so much. I would tell people, “sorry, this is a write-off — go buy a Sound Blaster.”

Even worse were the ones with modems built in — because then, you had an awful sound card AND an awful modem. Go buy a Sound Blaster and a USRobotics modem. So much for the value proposition…

The PCs themselves didn’t seem all that bad. They pioneered the era of bloatware, but otherwise worked OK, and the stuff inside was the same stuff you got anywhere else. Intel CPUs, Panasonic/MKE optical drives, Conner hard drives …. The motherboards were often just Intel reference designs, albeit in a weird shape that you couldn’t replace with another off-the-shelf board — and, OK, at the time, I held that as a reason not to buy one. But I was young and idealistic. None of those people were going to go hand-select a case, motherboard, RAM, CPU, hard drive, video card . . . . None of them were going to take the 50% BOM that was standard kit and put it in a new computer later, either, so it didn’t really matter whether or not they could. They weren’t ever going to. They were just going to use it until they couldn’t anymore, and then replace it with something entirely different. MAYBE they would take the entire computer to a store and transfer the hard drive over. Maybe. If they even knew that was a thing that could be done. But probably not. Instead, they would buy a box of disks and copy a few important files over before they gave the whole thing to a family member.

Packard Bell customers were not aficionados. And I think, honestly, that may have been the biggest problem. They weren’t savvy with computers. They didn’t know how to navigate Windows 3.1, they didn’t know what a CONFIG.SYS is or does, and they didn’t know why a Pentium from Packard Bell was so much more affordable than a Pentium from IBM. They just knew that it was. And it came with, like, a hundred CD-ROM discs, so it must just be a really good deal.

I think THAT was the biggest problem. Packard Bell didn’t really fail because the computers weren’t good. They failed because they lowered the barrier to entry enough that anyone could buy a computer. And “anyone” did. We hadn’t yet cleaned the place up enough for them to thrive, though.

Everything else that we criticized them for, was stuff that would become normal later. Cheap plastic. Off-brand sound cards and modems. Low-res monitors. Overwhelmed customer support. Proprietary case/motherboard/PSU pairings. Even “reconditioned” parts, likely returned because someone who could convince themselves to spend $1500 on a PC had no idea what to do with a $1500 PC, and decided it wasn’t worth their time to figure out. The higher prices of better computers weeded out the window-shoppers, and ensured a base level of enthusiasm. And, sure, maybe a slightly better quality PSU.