Packard Bell MZ User Review

[moon angel]

by Jessica Gardner

The Packard Bell MZ is the mainstay of the company's range in the UK. Whilst most Packard Bell laptops are only offered in one configuration, the MZ comes in many, offering Celeron, Core Duo and Core 2 Duo based packages all using the ATi Radeon Express 200 chipset and integrated graphics and an array of different standard disk configurations.

The MZ range was originally offered with Windows XP but was then moved to Windows Vista. As the XP drivers are still available it was decided to install XP Home instead of the Vista Home Premium that the laptop came with, as Vista was giving too many bugs and issues to be useable.

Packard Bell MZ (view large image)

Specs for this review:

• Intel Core Duo T2250 1.73GHz
• 1Gb (2x512mb sodimms) 533MHz DDR2 ram
• 60GB Seagate Momentus 5400.3 Hard Disk
• ATi xpress 200m 128MB IGP
• Mata DVD-ROM/CD-RW
• 15.4" Diamondview TFT @ 1280*800 (WXGA)

Reasons for Buying:

The previous desktop I had was on its last legs and a replacement was needed. The criteria were very basic, just e-mail and internet browsing, watching DVDs and uploading and resizing pictures from a digital camera. The laptop should provide good value for money, have decent quality build, and acceptable battery life (around 2 hours).

As a quick sale was needed and options for finance important the laptop was bought from a store. UK chains Comet, Currys and PC World were the possibles with PCWorld winning out not only with the best spec for the price (£400) but also the best finance deal.

Build and Design:

Packard Bell have been somewhat ropey in the past in both of these areas. The name 'Packard Hell' has been coined in my earshot before and the design has left something to be desired when it comes down to aesthetics. Taking the manufacturer's reputation into account the MZ-36 is a pleasant suprise! Gone is the tacky silver surround from the touchpad and the dodgy blue plastics, replaced by a simple and sleek black and silver design. Such is the standard of the design and build that I have accidentaly referred to this laptop as a Hewlett Packard on more than one occasion.

Lid view of Packard Bell MZ (view large image)

The build for a budget machine is nothing short of staggering. My experience with laptops in this price range would suggest slightly flimsey plastics and signs of mild cost cutting, but in this case not so. The plastics on the inside, while feeling slightly cheap to touch are incredibly robust and have the pleasing tectured effect one finds on a thinkpad. The lid is not quite so robust having gained a few small scratches in day to day use but the lid is easily cleaned and no part of the laptop shows up finger or palm marks.

One certainly feels that to physically break anything on this laptop would require more than normal force and this is very comforting.

Some omissions from the spec are more startling however. Firstly the laptop does not come with either PCMCIA or Expresscard slots. In this case this was inconsequential as the owner would not use such devices, however for more technical users this could present a problem. One also worries about the Mata optical drive as these are prone to failure.

Size comparison to a ThinkPad X Series 12.1" ultraportable (view large image)

Lastly, the greatest omisson of all is a wireless network card. In today's environment this is staggering as even the cheapest laptops these days tend to include them. Again this is of little consequence to the owner who uses a USB speedtouch modem and there is a mini pci slot and two antennae should one wish to ever upgrade it.

Screen

(view large image)

The Diamondview glossy screen is bright and has good if not amazingly bright colours. It certainly appears to have better colour brightness and contrast than a matte screen of a similar budget machine. The screen arrived with no dead pixels and the standard resolution of 1280*800 is ideal offering nicely readable text and enough space for the small number of applications the owner uses. Light shining on the screen is not really an issue and can be easily ignored, which is a bonus. The more important thing to note about the screen is that it is actually impossible to open with one hand as the base of the laptop moves upwards with the screen such is the strength of the hinges. This is coroborated by the impressive lack of wobble on the hinges when pushed and this helps to reduce screen flex. The amount of flex shown with reasonable pressure would not be anywhere near enough to cause damage to the screen.

Sound and Speakers:

The speakers at first glance appear to be tiny offering a small output on the very front edge of the laptop. This diminutive appearance is at odds with their performance however. The speakers offer enough power for listening to music and DVD watching in close proximity to the laptop and are capable of drowning out most normal background noise easily. They also feature impressive bass performance for such small speakers. Sound volume is altered by using the function and F10/F11 keys, however there is no on-screen speaker volume bar and nothing other than a small beep to let the user know when the sound is muted or turned back on.

Performance:

As was mentioned above, this laptop was changed from its original Windows Vista Home Premium to WIndows XP home as the performance (or lack thereof) of Vista did not make for an accurate depiction of the performance of the laptop.

As one would expect, with a Core Duo CPU, Seagate Momentus hard disk and 1GB ram basic tasks are dispatched with consumate ease. The presence of the Seagate Momentus hard disk in a budget machine is surprising and very pleasing as one would not expect such a high performance disk to be used in this price range. This almost makes up for the omissions in the hardware of the laptop. Opening applcations is lightning fast on such a clean OS install, the user is never left waiting for anything bar complex progarms such as Adobe Photoshop.

The ATi Radeon xpress 200m IGP is a mixed blessing. For a basic user it offers excellent performance with Windows XP and Windows Vista and as an IGP consumes minimal power. However the x200m does have a few flaws for those more adventurous who would test its gaming capability.

The x200m has surprisingly competent performance in DirectX based games such as World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. All of these run well at native resolution on low settings. More advanced games like FEAR and Battlefield 2 struggle however being for the most part unplayable. This version of the x200m takes ram from the main system memory and the lack of dedicated graphics ram shows. The other main issue with the x200m is abysmal openGL performance. Games such as City of Heroes are utterly unplayable even at the very lowest settngs. There is also the issue that the x200m has never really had proper support from ATi. Omega drivers work well for the most part but being placed over stock drivers can cause issues with Adobe Flash Player. Best performance is achieved with Omega drivers on a clean windows install.

Benchmarks:

The standard for Dual Core cpu benchmarks has recently shifted from the single threaded Super Pi to the multithreaded wPrime. This gives a more accurate view of overall cpu performance taking into account the increased performance of multi-core cpus. Compared with other systems with the same cpu the Packard Bell does seem to lag behind a little bit posting times more akin to a Core Duo 2050 than a 2250.

CPU test: wPrime calculating 32 million digits of pi:

Notebook	Time
Packard Bell MZ-36 (Core Duo T2250 1.73GHz)	53.784s
Samsung R20 (Core Duo T2250 1.73GHz)	47.065s
Asus A6JC (Core Duo T2300 1.66Ghz)	52.750s
Hewlett Packard dv6000z (Turion X2 TL-60 2.00GHz)	45.703s
Acer Aspire 5052 (Turion X2 TL-50 1.6GHz)	57.920s
Sager 5760 (Core 2 Duo T7200 2.00GHz)	42.386s

As this is an IGP and not up to date technology a score in 3dmark05 might be more valuable than one in 3dmark06 as more of a differenciation can be made between the scores.

Graphics test: 3dmark05

Notebook	3DMark05 Points
Packard Bell MZ-36 (Radeon Xpress 200m 128MB)	592
Toshiba Satellite Pro L100 (Radeon Xpress 200m 128MB)	515
Compaq v6000 (Geforce go 6150 256MB)	638
Samsung R20 (Radeon Xpress 1250 256MB)	1269
HP Compaq 6515b (Radeon Xpress 1270 up to 512MB)	871
Dell Inspiron 1501 (Radeon Xpress 1150 up to 256MB)	600

The 3dmark05 score for the Packard Bell is at the upper end of x200m scores. This is likely due to the IGP using the cpu for some of the graphics functions, the powerful Core Duo helping the IGP towards a better score than other x200m based laptops, notably the Toshiba L100 above which has a single core Celeron-M cpu.

Generally the MZ-36 remains very quiet. Only when running the benchmarking software has the fan come on at high speed. It occasionally comes on at low speed during normal use but only for a few seconds.

Keyboard and Touchpad:

(view large image)

The keyboard has a small amount of flex under normal use but nothing worrying. It will be coerced into a more prominent movement when more than normal pressure is applied. The layout is simple and effective with a regular size laptop keyboard, centrally placed touchpad with two buttons and a simple bar above the keyboard housing the power and wifi buttons. My criticisms of the design would be simply that there are no buttons to control media players etc. and that being oval shaped, the touchpad lacks a useable scroll function. Otherwise the keyboard and touchpad are intuitive to use and the former is great for fast typing.

Input and Output Ports

Apart from the lack of PCMCIA or Expresscard the MZ-36 also has a minimalist approach to it's basic ports. Three USB 2.0 ports are featured, two on the rear and one on the left hand side, but some other common ports have been omitted. There is a VGA output for external monitor but no S-Video out for a TV, a feature usually found even on budget machines. There is also no modem, with just an ethernet port for the wired LAN card. This is less of a worry with the majority of users these days using broadband, but it does give the laptop less flexibility for more technical users. One might also expect four USB ports on a laptop of this size and better space management from Packard Bell could have easily accomodated this.

Front view of Packard Bell MZ (view large image)

Back view of Packard Bell MZ (view large image)

Right view of Packard Bell MZ (view large image)

Left view of Packard Bell MZ (view large image)

Battery:

Typically for a budget machine the MZ-36 is supplied with a 4-cell battery. With the cpu set to auto throttle this gives around 2 hours of battery life under light use, browsing or ms office for example and 90 minutes DVD playback.

OS and Software:

The Laptop originally came with Windows Vista Home Premium and this is the standard for the entire MZ-36 range. The installed bloatware was not too bad, consisting of a Norton free trial, AOL 9.0 and some other free trials that were easily dispatched. As with most budget systems the useful software included was minimal, amounting to free trials, the operating system and little else. The Packard Bell recovery software pre-installed on the laptop is nothing short of useless. The recovery discs can only be written as DVDs (a huge oversight on a laptop sold with no DVD writer) and even when a DVD writer was installed would refuse to write, simply performing an illegal operation and closing. Smart recovery to original settings also did not work, making the software entirely useless. This is certainly very bad for the less technical user who might wish to use such features instead of installing windows from a windows disc.

Finding Vista Home Premium on such a cheap machine is comforting, and when Vista is somewhat more reliable it may find it's way back on to this MZ-36.

Customer Support

At odds with the abysmal Packard Bell recovery software installed on the MZ-36, the Packard Bell website is easy and quick to use, offering support, driver downloads for Vista and XP and any information the user might need in an intuitive no-nonsense and informative way. An auto search function using the laptop's serial number to find drivers or a visual model chooser make finding support and drivers for your Packard Bell quick and easy. That said, I have heard bad stories about their phone support service.

Conclusion

The Packard Bell MZ-36 is somewhat of a mixed bag. It offers good hardware specs and great build for a budget machine but has some rather obvious omissions in the less important hardware. This makes it ideal for a casual home user who wishes it only for basic tasks but not up to more technical functions that an advanced user may want.

Pros:

• Top class build for any notebook, not just budget sector
• Good basic hardware spec
• Fast performance for a basic use machine
• Compatible with XP
• Wonderful screen

Cons:

• No built in wireless network card
• No PCMCIA or Expresscard
• Packard Bell recovery software is a joke
• Ships with Vista only

[Algus]

My first desktop was a Packard Bell. Sometimes I forget they exist since they don't do business in the US anymore :P Looks strange to see them without their early 90s logo and I still imagine that poor video of the Packard Bell Navigator woman whenever I think of PB but hey :P

The case looks very sleek and basic...I've always been drawn to simplistic case designs mainly because they remind me of my first notebook. A number of the drawbacks you mentioned seem almost shocking and I know that if this was an option in my part of the world I wouldn't even consider it. Very surprised that there's no built-in wireless, I wouldn't dream of owning a notebook without it.

I like moving to install XP on it though. Now instead of having a somewhat low end Vista notebook you've got a higher end XP notebook. I'm also a fan of the ATI IGP.

[Andrew]

No Wi-Fi? no ExpressCard or PCMCIA slot? And a round touchpad? The designers at Packard Bell should be fired for those shortcomings alone, but at least you found a few bright spots for a budget PC.

My first desktop PC was also a Packard Bell. Following a Commodore 64 of course.

[nghqminh]

Are you kidding me? A laptop without a wireless card? Who would buy this laptop except it is a really really good deal! Moreover, it is ugly!

[gilo]

Not an issue as 10$ (5£) will get him a Wifi card at ebay .

But I never been a fan of Packard Bell , my opinion is that they specilize in subpar underspeced products with what you can call some style to lure in buyers .

Too many corners were cut here , at ~800$ I'd call this an "overpriced" notebook ( very low value/$ ) even if its in the UK .

[Woodgypsy]

I don't think I've ever seen a notebook which doesn't have any ports on its right side.... And no Wifi, only with 4Cell? I feel sorry that Moon Angel has to use this after reviewing Zepto. But then, I don't think there will be any rabid forum users attacking this review, so its not all that bad I guess.

[Ice-Tea]

The round touchpad has been a part of company identity, it seems..

[Kdawgca]

Originally Posted by Andrew

No Wi-Fi? no ExpressCard or PCMCIA slot? And a round touchpad? The designers at Packard Bell should be fired for those shortcomings alone, but at least you found a few bright spots for a budget PC.

LOL, I can understand the no Wifi installed(if your laptop is 4+ years old like mine ) but the omission of the ExpressCard and PCMCIA is baffling since they offer nice upgrade options and a convenience.


BTW, Nice review

[dziubelis]

And it comes with Vista...

[John Ratsey]

Thanks for a helpful review which highlights what to look out for at the budget end of the market. One has to go shopping with a check list because the absence of some components may be unexpected. USB wireless cards are cheap and easy to find (although the antennae are not as good as built-in wireless) but USB modems are rare and expensive.

As for build quality and support, we should have another look after a couple of years of use.

It's interesting that the wPrime score is significantly down on the Samsung R20 with the same CPU (but seeing the differences in performance between notebooks with similar hardware is part of the fun of reading reviews).

John