Packard Bell iextreme 6060 > Reviews > iXtreme Value

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Fast
Design	Excellent
Manufacturer Support	Good
Ease of use	Very easy
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	Good looks &  performance, TFT screen,  Very quiet, reliability
Disadvantages:	Relatively little memory as supplied, cheap mouse

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

After a succession of 'built to order' and home built machines of varying reliability, we decided to buy one off the shelf. The main argument being that it would be factory assembled, with greater Quality control than the smaller 'build to order' companies could manage.

After trailing round PC world, Comet, Dixon's etc, we finally settled on a n iXtreme with the following spec:

Intel P4 2.5Ghz, 256Mb PC2100 ram, 80GB Maxtor Hard Disk, DVD, CDRW & Floppy drives small powered speakers (2) keyboard with cd & web buttons and a basic wheel mouse. and a 15" TFT screen. Good value at £739.

Supplied software is Win XP Home SP1, MS Works, MS Word, Norton Internet security & anti-Virus 2003. a whizzy CD writing App, DVD player plus some games & Educational stuff I didn't bother with. Setup was a breeze, apart from Win XP Service Pack 1 having the Welchia worm , but Norton got rid of it OK.

This was bought as a Home business PC , so on went MS Office 2000 and the full Macromedia Studio MX 2004 (Which cost more than the PC!) . at this point, I found that 256Mb was just not enough, as windows was always running out of virtual memory. so in went another 512Mb, and now it's much smoother.

So far it's been rock solid (Touches wood as writes that!)

So from now on I'm sticking to 'band Name' PC's - Packard Bell most likely. A bit more expensive, but it pays in reliability, and a VERY helpful user forum at www.packardbell.co.uk