Have you been horrendously unlucky with one specific brand?

[lxskllr]

GM vehicles. Never had one that wasn't junk. WD drives. My only drive failures have been WD, even though I've had less of them than any other.

 

[Ryun]

For me, it's always been OCZ memory (when they were around) and XFX graphics cards. XFX at least bends over backwards to correct the problems -- both big and small -- but I always seem to have bad luck with them. I don't really mind buying from them as a result since they take care of me, but I always observe their products carefully the moment I get them in the mail.

 

[crashtech]

GM vehicles. Never had one that wasn't junk. WD drives. My only drive failures have been WD, even though I've had less of them than any other.

I hope they haven't infected HGST...

 

[alcoholbob]

Seasonic Gold/Platinum PSUs. I've had 4 die in the last year and a half. The last PSU that died on me was back in 1993. So this is somewhat frustrating.

 

[bradly1101]

Asus burned me on 2 mobos and a Seagate drive failed pretty quickly.

I've been lucky I guess, but I always go overboard with whole system cooling. When I was using dual 5850's(?) I mounted an internal fan fed by a fresh air duct to cool them.

Unlike others, WD and MSI have been rock solid for me. My current HTPC was my gaming rig back when the i7-920 was new. MSI mobo is still a happy camper all these years later.

Pre-built systems might not have the best cooling depending on the vendor.

 

[bradly1101]

Oh, and Corsair stuff is awesome.

 

[DigDog]

I see Sony as inherently good. Had a proper oldskool walkman back in the 80s that was solid metal, indestructible, had speed control, could record, was loud as heck, a masterpiece. Then i had the PlayStation, another mesterpiece. And then i bought a 2.0 CD player that was superb. Not one of these failed, the 2.0 is still in service.
Was less happy with the PS2; it worked, but it didnt have that WOW factor.
Oh yeah i had a Discman too, back when you could turn the volume up loud enough to make your ears burn. That and a cd copy of Ultraviolence - Killing God, kept me going for a couple years.

 

[NoCreativity]

ATI is the only one I can think of right now. I only had one card a while ago but I was constantly having to do driver updates/re-installs.

Sony has been pretty good for me. Currently on a 9 your old LCD and blu ray that's probably at least 5 or 6 years old.

So to answer the OP, no I have not.

 

[thebestMAX]

Never buy list: Asus, Sony, Acer , Viewsonic

Had very good luck with Shuttle MBS, MSI and HP products even tho others here say otherwise. Never had a AMD processor fail even when overclocked. Best luck with WD drives.

Now if I could only get a car battery to last over 3 years.

 

[Genx87]

Closest thing would be ATI\AMD GPUs. I had a 960 back in the day. It died within 12 months. I bought a 4850. It lasted about 13 months. And then a 5870 and it lasted about 12 months. Remarkable how each card lasted about 1 year before they died. Next is Mazda. I will not buy a Mazda again. Bad windshield, differentials, and brakes.

 

[Ottonomous]

Lots of cool replies ITT

I know this is a bit Off-topic for this thread and OT, but how should I have gone about the 6950 debacle I experienced?

- I ordered a reference 6950
- Suddenly a few days after ordering, a SuperBiiz Employee responsible for assembly (big mistake but wanted to save on shipping) named Bill Yu contacts me
- Suddenly the reference ATi 6950s are out of stock, and that he's prepared a replacement: custom cooled 6950 from Sapphire, in a 'favour' tone
- Okay it
- Arrived dead of course and what appeared to be an obfuscated/F'ed BIOS ROM
- I got angry of course and contacted him accusing him of sending me someone's RMA'ed card, maybe his of course - and that said person tried the shader unlock on a card with a locked ROM
- He apparently panics because he sends me some internal receipt with a reference 6950 on it, then demands I delete said email (It was delete upon reception but I didn't because I wanted something tangible)
- I call them and after a while talking with what appeared to be the slowest individual in telephoning history, manager says ship it
- Follow up on the phone but never make the window because of the mail suspension following the assassination of the terrorist.

I really don't want to think it, but it looks like he shipped the bad card knowing I might never meet the window period, or just oblivious. He could've pocketed the 250USD, or worse fixed his mistake with a replacement 6950 for free.

EITHER WAY - NEVER EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES TRUST SUPERBIIZ - NEVER. I ENCOUNTERED COUNTLESS OTHER COMPLAINTS AND SIMILAR EXPERIENCES WHILE GOING THROUGH THIS

 

[Scarpozzi]

I see Sony as inherently good. Had a proper oldskool walkman back in the 80s that was solid metal, indestructible, had speed control, could record, was loud as heck, a masterpiece. Then i had the PlayStation, another mesterpiece. And then i bought a 2.0 CD player that was superb. Not one of these failed, the 2.0 is still in service.
Was less happy with the PS2; it worked, but it didnt have that WOW factor.
Oh yeah i had a Discman too, back when you could turn the volume up loud enough to make your ears burn. That and a cd copy of Ultraviolence - Killing God, kept me going for a couple years.

I had a walkman and discman too. Their old solid state stuff was great in the 70's/80's. The walkman was a great device and I liked the design of the one I had in the late 80s/early 90s...very cool and decent battery life...I remember having one that I used to take camping and on bus trips for school when I was a kid. I used a Discman in my car with a cassette adapter for years until after 2001 when I was able to get a new enough vehicle to have a CD player. My gripe on Sony, specifically, comes from them not honoring a warranty and giving me no options for support when there was a valid circuitry failure on a decently expensive item in less than 1 year from purchase. Other vendors I've worked with stood behind their products much better than Sony did the ones I had issues with. The only way I can 'get them back' is to tell people my story and not buy their products. Just know that you may never have to get support for something and if you do, they may treat you great. I was just disappointed with something that would have essentially cost them a $10 circuit board to fix on a $150-200 item. I've been Sony free for 18 years now...steered clear of Bravia for Panasonic, Samsung, and Vizio TVs and buy Xbox instead of PS4 because of that one issue. I'm not looking back. I hold a grudge.

 

[Scarpozzi]

GM vehicles. Never had one that wasn't junk. WD drives. My only drive failures have been WD, even though I've had less of them than any other.

I drove a 2003 Buick Regal for like 12+ years. It was a great car...lots of space, 200hp for a sedan, and I could haul lumber in it better than my truck (like 20+ foot long boards) without having to tie them down. The engine was the 3800 Series II....probably one of the best engines GM ever made. Was designed for like 4-5 years and I think they kept it in production for 8-10 because of how stable it was. I had an issue with the ignition switch ($90 wire bundle), some plastic valves that started leaking ($6), and typical belt and hose replacement/brakes and rotors. I dumped Dexcool as soon as I could because that stuff gums up every 5 years...clots in the lines when it breaks down and clogs the system. Aside from those maintenance things, the car lasted 150k miles and was a great value for $13k...

Just saying YMMV when it comes to cars. JD Power gives decent reliability ratings so you can establish which cars may be flops. Every year, cars have less and less metal to decrease weight/increase mpg....but we hope engineering is working through the common pitfalls to increase longevity too.

I also had a bunch of WD drives fail....but I've also lost Maxtor and Seagate drives as well. Having worked as a sysadmin, in the past 20 years they've worked on logging drive cycles...stops/starts and they are essentially limiting how long you can use drives. They have 'pre-emptive' failures and nonsense like that coming from S.M.A.R.T. enabled drives. The concept is to catch errors before the failure happens so you can order replacements and keep RAID going without waiting on multiple drives to fail.... The problem is that they're simply averaging useful life of those drives when some may function for another 10 years before they actually fail.....unless they're powered down and back up, they often will continue running. Having said that, detecting disk errors in advance may give you the heads up to backup your data in-advance. It's just better to have other layers of redundancy past just having all your data on one drive. I'm curious how many of these drives self-destruct due to the logging they do and how many actually have real hard drive failures (not counting the ones that make a crunching sound).

 

[Thebobo]

VIA motherboards - POS

 

[brianmanahan]

not a brand, but i got screwed by tigerdirect a couple of times so i swore off their deals

 

[brianmanahan]

GM vehicles. Never had one that wasn't junk. WD drives. My only drive failures have been WD, even though I've had less of them than any other.

same with ford for me. all i drive is hondas now, they last twice as long.

 

[IronWing]

not a brand, but i got screwed by tigerdirect a couple of times so i swore off their deals

Tigerdirect is the great Satan of customer care.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I do not really have a brand i hate. I once bought a memory kit with one stick defective. All my other products have worked for years and after years of no hassle functioning, some products break down after years of use. It happens.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Now that i think of it, i did have an asus dvd writer that stopped functioning after a few months.

 

[Thebobo]

GM vehicles. Never had one that wasn't junk. WD drives. My only drive failures have been WD, even though I've had less of them than any other.

Haha i've only had one non Gm car in my life. Mostly because I wanted the split drop down tailgate.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

The absolute horror: The superbiiz guy apparently got anxious and sent me a proof receipt for the 6950 with a 'delete-me' email. Anyhow they accept after some calls so long as I can premium-mail the card back within the 30 days

On my way and truly happy, Obama announces the assassination of Bin Laden and now all mail from Saudi Arabia has been banned from the US until further notice. A total and shambolic loss of 250USD, my sanity and patience and time.

He was a military combatant in an active war, that isn'tan assassination, its a war casualty.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Haha i've only had one non Gm car in my life. Mostly because I wanted the split drop down tailgate.

GM cars are trash and they dont stand behind their vehicles. I had an HHR that had been in the shop more than it was out despite being bought brand new and it being less than a year old. Then it started leaking in the floor board and i was told while they would fix the leak since its a known and very large problem, they wouldnt fix the carpet since they dont cover water damage... even though it was caused by a known problem.

 

[Ottonomous]

He was a military combatant in an active war, that isn'tan assassination, its a war casualty.

Non-native English speaker, I took a moment but didn't know the appropriate word, knowing its a contentious issue (choice of word).

 

[LikeLinus]

Seagate, by far. I run RAID 1 at home and buy drives in pairs. I've owned (4) 1.5TB, (4) 3TB and (4) 4TB drives over the years. Out of all of those, one 1 3TB drive still runs. Actually, its replacement is still running. Sadly, I purchased the 4TB before the 3TB drives started failing.

So now my server is filled with WD, HGTS and Samsung (SSD) drives. Haven't had a single failure since. I'll never buy another Seagate drive.

 

[darkswordsman17]

I'm not sure there's any brand that consistently gave me issues. I have had a couple of instances that would sour me on buying from those companies again.

One was with Mushkin RAM. Bought some high speed gaming memory back on the Athlon 64. One stick became defective (blue screens, and memtest showed clear failure of the memory; other RAM worked fine) so I started a return request. I was waiting for the RMA# or something from them but didn't hear anything for like a month (had good communication, then it just completely stopped), and had other things going on in my life (had a family member have a serious health issue), so had forgotten about it. Awhile later (not sure how long, might've been a year, but their warranty was still in effect), I am getting rid of old PC stuff and find the RAM, and so contact them again. Apparently the guy I had been in contact with had left on some extended humanitarian aid mission or something (they talked like he didn't quit, but he had been gone the entire time, apparently they didn't have someone else take over for him?), and so the next person I got into contact with handled it in a poor way I thought and I sent a displeased email about how they were handling it (I did not go on a profanity laced tirade or anything as I've never done that with customer service as it will never actually help things, I just said that I wasn't pleased with being ignored and then all the extra time, and I think they wanted me to do the whole process over - retest the memory and everything, and provide a bunch of proof of purchase stuff, and everything that I had already done). That got escalated to the CEO who then scolded me. I don't know if he didn't know the situation or what (I can't imagine him thinking how they handled it didn't warrant some displeasure from a customer), but I thought that was really unprofessional. He said that they'd replace my memory but that I could take my business elsewhere and wouldn't provide support for me in the future. Which they did replace the memory and I did take my business elsewhere. I actually felt guilty for awhile but looking back, I really feel like they were the ones that handled things poorly.

The other was BFG Tech. I'd bought two of their 6800GT cards to do SLI, and one of them went bad. They sent me an AGP version (this was right around when PCIe first came out and SLI being one of the big features of it), and wanted me to pay return shipping, and then I believe it took an extended amount of time to get the return card (or they ended up not having a replacement so wanted to send me a 6600 or something?). If I remember right, BFG was having a lot of problems and ended up going out of business (after having had a stellar reputation, they used to be like EVGA was), or something where they completely changed (I think some other company bought the brand but they weren't the same ever again).

Oh, I guess a couple of others were when ZipZoomFly and Monarch Computers were basically going out of business but didn't tell people (and were still taking orders and stuff, which ended up with people have all manner of problems).