In hindsight, what was the worst hardware purchase you have ever made?

[clarkey01]

When a freind bought a celeron 1.7 northwood for a games rig, he spent all his dosh on a top end 5900 ultra and 2 GB Ram etc and was left with 40 quid.

Celeron...for a gaming rig......Every game..........just lagged.

 

[clarkey01]

I should of given him a barton 3000+, I have my means.

 

[Coquito]

The seagate 160gig ata drive last week. This week the 200 gigger comes out for the same price. Blah.

 

[bluemax]

I sold a perfectly-working Dell 17" Trinitron that did good 1600x1200 and everything. I replaced it with a 21" Trinitron (which I'll admit I got for free from my workplace when they were clearing out their oldies.)

Well, a month later the monitor has lost vertical stability and I can only see the center 50% of the screen.

And I'm basically broke so I'll be lucky if I can replace it with a used 15" @ 800x600.

 

[Horsepower]

This thread brings back memories of Packard Bell, thank goodness I never had one. My screwups were my HP4c scanner ($975 and it's sitting in storage in the back room of my office); Belkin USB video bus (bought 2 versions and they NEVER worked); and my 19 inch Viewsonic monitor has never been really right from day one (I paid retail plus). DANG I almost forgot my "first" DVD drive, Acer POS!

 

[trexpesto]

Soyo barebones combo that puts the HSF half-blocked by the crappy PSU. I have to run it underclocked. Still waiting for my rebates.:|

 

[ttown]

$450 for a 40MB full-height hard-drive (late 1980's) Prices have gone down a little since then.

followed closely by a $20 Lexmark color printer ("oh, would you like ink with that?... that'll be another $35")

runner up: $99 for an io/mega 4x cdrw, about 2 weeks before the 12x was cut to the same price

 

[UTmtnbiker]

HP 940C inkjet printer. The initial cost was so low...who could resist? Now, OEM ink carts for this thing are ridiculous. I'd take it out back and put a bullet in it, except I can't bear to admit to myself how I should've done my homework and looked at cost per page.

 

[littlebitstrouds]

One of those eyeglasses that makes games 3D off the screen. Spent $80 on it and my refresh rate on my monitor was never high enough at a decent resolution.

 

[imported_jediknight]

Well, a few purchases I'd rather have back:
100 pack unbranded CD-Rs - They're losing data already.. damn cheap Ritek!
GeForce4 MX440SE - Thought it would speed up gaming on my Celeron 900 last year.. It's in the junk pile now :->
Athlon 64 3000+ - Great processor.. but I bought it 2 weeks before the price drop. Arg.

A few others, not made by me:
Cyrix 300 computer (uuugh)
IBM Celeron 900 computer - in a crappy small case with no expansion possibilities, and no AGP slot (not that it could even fit a normal expansion card.. )

 

[Rubicante]

PC hardware? everything i've bought has been worth buying...
but if anyone wants my MB Quart Premium series 6.5" car speakers (components), you're welcome to 'em. worst speakers i've ever bought, and they cost more than any other speakers i've ever bought.

 

[Hankysmoo]

Originally posted by: goog
Aside from the overly expensive first computer, a P120 by NEC (remember the "Ready" line) that I had beyond its useful life; I'd say the HP 4X DVD burner for $170 that I've used exactly once.

LOL!!! I had the P133 by NEC (Ready 9542 i think). OMG THAT WAS A POS! It was the first "top of the line" computer my parents ever bought. With printer and monitor, that rig set us back about $3000 :Q. I hated that computer, as it had problems playing almost every game I threw at it such as warcraft 2, mechwarrior 2, and the curse of monkey island. The days of calling NEC tech support still haunt me to this day.

 

[2Xtreme21]

ATI Radeon 9600SE -- $125 @ Best Buy.

'Nuff said.

 

[qdogforeva]

Voodoo 5 5500 PCI $299 @Babbages

I was just getting into gaming and had heard all the hype around 3dfx. It was a nice card, with great FSAA ...too bad 3dfx went out of buisness the next day... I thought, hey, I'll get a good w2k driver that supports all the cards features! I'll be OK with XP!!!.....Man was I wrong.

That's what I get for not saving my reciept. And believing hype....and not researching other products and...

Well, regardless, I sold the card when I picked up my 9500Pro. The guy still uses the Voodoo today, if that is a testiment to its quality. I was just foolish and picked a BAAAD time to support a company.

 

[JetBlack69]

Sony tape drive. For CPUs faster than 400 MHz, it had to run at PIO-4 mode. Slowest backup ever.

 

[PsharkJF]

Buying a Pentium MMX just before P2's came out.

 

[Dantzig]

A barebones K6 3D system from Tiger Direct. Piece of crap system with zero support from Tiger Direct.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
The IBM Ace Modem+Soundcard combo card. This was a very shortlived experiment in using a single DSP for both tasks. It worked miserably.

LOL. The MWAVE!!!

I had to work on a computer once for a fellow.. it had an MWAVE for the sound and modem, on a Cyrix CPU, on a.. I swear, it was probably an ECS or PCChips mobo, inside a tiny, cramped, dusty, overheating case. No wonder the thing was crashing. I swear, I think it must have been possessed or something. Cursed by bad components. I worked on it, thought that it was working, called the guy the next day after cleaning it out, defragging, installing new MWAVE drivers, running it for a little bit - when he came to pick it up, it BSODed, right then and there. Ok, so I guess it wasn't ready for pick-up yet. I apologized, and told him that I guess I would have to work on it some more. So I fiddle with it some more, check a few more things, everything at this point *should* theoretically be stable. So I let it basically burn-in, for two days straight. No crashes, nothing. Ok, so I tell him it's ready to pick up again. Get this - as soon as he steps into the doorway, it BSODs... AGAIN. Yeah. At that point, there was nothing more that I could really do, but I recommended an exorcist. (Or a complete system replacement upgrade, I guess. He didn't have the budget for that.)

 

[Texun]

Going way back about 7 years or maybe more I bought a new board with an AMD K5-166 CPU. That was the first time AMD tried the PR rating. I kept it for less than a week and returned it for a K6-200 which was a much improved processor over the K5 sloth.

More recently - My ATI RADEON 9800 non-pro. Thought I might get pro performance but found out it had the slower memory. It works fine for what it is but I wish I would have held off on the purchase.

 

[McMadman]

Originally posted by: vegetation
My Cyrix 6x86-PR200+ system. Didn't know Cyrix took PR ratings out of their rear end, was more like a PR150 in every respect. Then in a year the chip had instability with its native speed so I had to underclock it just so I wouldn't get errors. Talk about a POS.

I know your pain. I owned one of these horrid things, for starters they weren't running at a standard bus speed. 66 was the standard at the time with a 1/2 divider for the pci bus to run at 33mhz. It worked well for maybe 2-3 months and then it got worse and worse.

On the chip itself, it said to run a 75mhz fsb and 2x multiplier, so it was indeed only running at 150mhz, but on a 75mhz fsb so your pci bus was out of spec at 37.5mhz instead of the 33 things were designed to run at.

I'm not sure if it was the overclock which made them so horribly unstable, or just the fact that the chips were garbage. I used to wake up every day to a hardlocked system - I eventually bought a real p233 to replace it. This also doubles as my worst hardware purchase.

 

[CraigRT]

>>>EPoX mainboard... only board I've ever personally had fail in a system in my own PC.

>>>any product by Linksys...all junk. 2/3 products I've purchased from Linksys were defective.

>>>GEIL memory... oh my lord! the source of all instabilities I was having with my PC.. would not even run @ stock speeds with stability... WORTHLESS!

>>>LG GSA-4040B DVD-RW drive... never wrote the media at claimed speeds.. never once after burning about 10 discs got it to write at 4x. tried everything and no go.. RMA'd in exchange for a Plextor. Plextor working great as of now.

>>>GlobalWin FOP38 heatsink with the stupid Delta SCREAMER 7k RPM fan.. drove me nuts.. eventually bought a 5k RPM 6cm fan for it and much better, but boy was I mad when I fired it up for the first time and heard that thing!!!

>>>Maxtor hard drives..(I hate them all) the only one still working out of any I've ever owned is the DiamondMax +60 20GB in my oldest PC, which has already been RMA'd once.

 

[WW2Planes1]

I've got one of those creative CD drives... got it for free though, and its not in use... never used it actually, now i know why my friend gave it to me...

Worst purchase... would have to be a Vantec Socket A heatsink... don't remember the model number, but it was the one with the 7000RPM fan. Aside from the noise, this was my first build (and Athlon 1.333), and I didn't know that just because you could plug that fan straight into the motherboard doesn't mean you SHOULD. I can't imagine what my motherboard went through, but after about 2 months, I'm going along, and suddenly, my computer reboots, and then restarts every time windows loads. for some reason, it took me that long to realize that my computer wasn't nearly as loud as it should have been.... The motherboard still worked... mostly... except that the CPU fan header didn't work, and DDR Slot 1 didn't work. my CPU was fried, along with my 256MB stick of DDR266. The motherboard, an MSI, got shelved and replaced with an Asus A7M that lasted me for a good while. Oh yeah... a month later, the MSI Video Card I got with that above purchase died... Ended up running a Diamond Monster Fusion (Voodoo Banshee GPU) for a while. total loss on that (CPU, Memory, Mobo, Vid Card was $600).


I'm surprised I don't see more of these, but I got a 60GB 60GXP as a christmas present once. I actually requested that drive based on several reviews stating that it was one of the best performing 7200RPM drives on the market. That stupid POS lasted 6 months before giving me the click of death. I RMAed it, and the thing started again after another 6 months. I gave up then. The thing's sitting in my room somewhere. It would actually probably still work, since the first time I got a bad sector, I just backed up all my data and backed the hard drive up in a box and shoved it in the top of my closet, never to be seen again.


i've made more bad purchases, but more often it's not the fault of the hardware, just the user (me). I've not had the greatest of luck. except, somehow, in getting an old ProGen Pentium MMX 166 system to work... It used to run Win95, but it's now running Win2000 Pro with a 30GB hard drive. All it does is word processing for my sister, but the darn thing boots up faster than my Athlon 1800XP did.

 

[iwantanewcomputer]

athlon 64 3000 with asus k8v deluxe and some watercooling crap a few months ago. wanted to do some serious overclocking on my first build. the asus has no pci lock so it will barely do 240htt stable and i got one of the processors with a memory controller that doesn't work above 220. i never even got the rest of the watercooling stuff and i'm running the memory under 200mhz not ad though for a first build under a grand

 

[BZeto]

When I was first getting into building computers and stuff I was scared to install my processor and heatsink onto the mobo. So I paid some local computer place to do it for like $60. I was so stupid and ignorant...

 

[mellostomp]

Originally posted by: BZeto
When I was first getting into building computers and stuff I was scared to install my processor and heatsink onto the mobo. So I paid some local computer place to do it for like $60. I was so stupid and ignorant...

Ouch.

Mine is a RaidMax storm case. Pretty red. POS.