I suppose it's no wonder this topic has so many hits. Cutting to length is usually the first step in making anything.
I have a soft spot for the old power hacksaws too. So much so that I've owned two of them, but each only for a short time.
The one was a beast of a unit. It cut, but not very straight and it seriously needed someone with more time than I have to give it some TLC. It was very loose and someone had seriously messed up the "lift on back stroke" mechanism. I still remember three of us almost killing ourselves moving it from my shed to load it into someone's trailer right after an ice storm.

The other was a really nice looking Craftsman unit. I ended up shipping it to another province to a guy that collected old Craftsman stuff. I bet I gave him an insanely good deal, but I was just happy to see it go to a good home. It had a really neat vice arrangement that I wish I would have taken some detailed photos of.

With both of them, i just found that no matter what I tried to tweak they still wouldn't cut very quickly and the action was very rough. Maybe it was just me.
I found a 4 x 6 bandsaw for sale locally about a year or two ago. It needed just the amount of TLC that I had time to give it. Someone had an old washing machine motor on there that was turning the wrong direction. The blade was mounted backwards to accommodate this. I changed the motor to one of the ones I got with the power hacksaws (too expensive to ship the motor with it), and tweaked the blade alignment until I was extremely happy with the result.
Yes, there are lots of things to complain about with these little saws but I have been happily surprised by just how capable they are when you treat them as what they are - a light/medium duty home shop machine. For what I do, this is by far the best choice.
