Most UNsatisfying HW purchase ??

[TreyRandom]

Either my Packard Hell P75 or my HP Photosmart 320. That HP camera corrupted my kid's first Halloween pictures. I had to buy some photo recovery software to recover them (all but one recovered, thankfully). HP tech support told me that they only "officially" support SanDisk flash memory. Even if that were true, thanks a hell of a lot for not stating that on Amazon's Web site, on your packaging, on your Web site, or in the product manual.

 

[othiekan]

*cough* i'd buy that laptop thats way up there ^
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Believe it or not, i could use a 266mhz lappy..

 

[neotype]

A 33.6 winmodem that sucked the life out of my system resources... and a mobo for an AMD200 that got so hot it burned up the day after i got it.

 

[Jfrag Teh Foul]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
Diamond FireGL 1000Pro
Asus A7V333-RAID :|
Philips Omniwriter 2.2.6 burner ($600 back in the day, and died twice)

Word. 3 tries and I went back to MSI.

 

[sao123]

Voodoo 5500AGP...bought card... 3 weeks later 3dfx out of business, and no games supported it
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Creative Labs DXR3 dvd kit. Never officially supported Win2k or XP, only in beta drivers. which btw never worked.

 

[ptw]

My worst was definitely an old, Iomega tape drive I bought to do backups (this was in the days when people ooh'ed and ahh'ed over Maxtor breaking the 528 MB limit LOL). TRAVAN tape drive or something like that.

This thing was noisy, slow, could never backup anything without reporting errors, and on subsequent backup attempts of the same data kept reporting DIFFERENT errors.

What a POS.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Yolner
My new p2 266 laptop i got for $20. They would have to pay me $50 just to keep this ancient piece of crap.

Geezowa. I could say the same thing... except the laptop that I got for $20 was a Toshiba T1900, a greyscale 486SX-20. At least, a PII-266 would still be usable. Amazingly, I can use the MS RDP client on Win95 (gold) to remotely-control my bigger rig, and it's still fairly responsive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Dennis Travis
mechBgon

Glad to see I was not the only one that got burned with the Phillips Omniwriter! Mine died and lived a very short life. For the $$$ I felt very ripped off.

I think that there was a class-action on that model of drive, if you still have it you might be eligible for a free upgrade. It may have only been the HP-branded versions, I don't remember. Might be worth checking out.

 

[theslug]

Abit KA7 motherboard. Capacitors exploded 6 months after getting it. Got another, same problem happened a year later. Also know someone else who had the same board and the same thing happened to theirs.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: AnitaPeterson
Back in the spring of '98, when CD-RWs were just becoming mainstream, I got a Philips CDD 3610... I had to chose between that one or a HP 7200i... same price... and I foolishly went with he Philips, for which I'd seen some reviews and magazine articles, thinking a respectable electronics firm would put out good products.. the sucker was like US$369... died on me twice within the first year, lost a lot of time and money with sending it for repairs, got plenty of coasters... ended up dying the third and final time in late 1999... never buy Philips again. There was even a class-action lawsuit on that model... I bought an HP 8250i in April 1999, and it still works to this day.

Ironically, that HP7200i was a Phillips drive too, I believe. The HP 8xxx series were mostly Sony, IIRC. So you would have ended up with a Phillips-made drive regardless, out of your original two choices.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: schdaddy
Nexgen 90MHz CPU & MB
I don't know WTF I was thinking. And of course at the time it seemed like a great deal especially for HS kid w/ little cash.

Oddly, it ran many things faster than my friends Pentium 90 but didn't run Quake worth a sh!t.
So I spent that summer working my ass off for a P150 & MB.

EDIT:
Didn't AMD buy Nexgen right before they designed the K6?

Don't recall exactly when, but wasn't the K5 based on the Nexgen? I'm guessing that the integer performance was fine, but the FPU performance was crap, or it used a non-pipelined FPU, that's why Quake ran badly. Quake was optimized specificially for the pipelined FPU present in the original Intel Pentium CPUs.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: renierh
same here, exept i also bought the plextor scsi cd-rom, because that combo would supposedly NEVER give any toasters, and i was told it was the only way you could use discdupe to copy..

anyway, i had the expensive asus scsi mainboard, the expensive writer AND the expensive cd-rom, and i never ever benefitted from it as far as i could tell. this was back in '97 by the way.
have a IDE NEC ND-2510A now. i think i prefer it.

Trust me, if you weren't up to your eyeballs in expensive coasters and bad burns (as was common from the cheaper IDE CD burners back in the day, especially before burn-proof), then you were definately benefiting from your Plextor/SCSI setup, even if you perhaps didn't realize it.

 

[neotype]

Originally posted by: theslug
Abit KA7 motherboard. Capacitors exploded 6 months after getting it. Got another, same problem happened a year later. Also know someone else who had the same board and the same thing happened to theirs.

I had one.. same thing.. funny stuff.. I always trusted Abit until that board, now i have an Asus.

 

[So]

Originally posted by: theslug
Abit KA7 motherboard. Capacitors exploded 6 months after getting it. Got another, same problem happened a year later. Also know someone else who had the same board and the same thing happened to theirs.

Ah yes, that was the first round of dying cap's I think the KG7 around the same time was affected. My KT7 was not fortunately, and is still running today <crosses fingers>

The KR7 was a response to this and has HUGE nice looking capacitors, I think that board did a lot to rebuild ABIT's rep.

O'course it was the good ol' bp6, bx6, and bh6 that built their rep in the first place.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: dwcal
Creative CT7160 DVD decoder- It worked, but it had buggy drivers. The most annoying part was that it wouldn't letterbox widescreen movies! It stretched the picture to the full height of the screen. That was so annoying. I hated that thing. Replaced it with a Hollywood+ that I shoulda bought to begin with. Should've tossed it years ago, but it still might be sitting in my closet.

Ha! I had one of those. I made the (mistake?) of buying a "Creative Labs DVD Multimedia Kit 700" or somesuch, from my then-employer, who had a small computer-reseller business. Some customer returned it, and the box was in kinda crappy shape, so I made a deal to buy at around cost.

Still cost me like $200 or so, I think. (Maybe $250?) Anyways, it included.. a 4MB Creative Labs Graphics Blaster Exxtreme card, PCI Permedia2 chipset, CT7160 DVD decoder card (and 26-pin VPE cable), SB Awe64 Value ISA, Creative 2X IDE DVD-ROM, and PCWorks 2.1 speaker set.

Stupid me thought, without fully reading the side of the box, that since this was a complete DVD multimedia kit, it would include 4-channel surround-sound. I didn't realize that Creative also made a 2.1 speaker set at the time, or that the sound card included wasn't even capable of 4-channel sound. Yeah, I know, should always do your homework before buying hardware, but this was kind of an impulse use-it-or-lose-it deal.

Clearly, I overpaid, but individually the components found some use, I still use the speakers and DVD drive to this day. (RPC1 baby - no region-coding!) I don't think that I ever used the DVD decoder card though, I sold it for $5 some years later. (My PII and ATI RagePro AGP had enough power to decode DVDs on their own, thankfully, and with better quality than that "decoder".) The SB Awe64 Value was a nice little upgrade to my SB16 ISA too.

I probably should have just saved my money though, and bought some seperate speakers and a DVD-ROM drive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: sao123
Creative Labs DXR3 dvd kit. Never officially supported Win2k or XP, only in beta drivers. which btw never worked.

I thought that the DXR3 was a re-labeled Hollywood or Hollywood+, and you could modify the .INF to get the drivers to work with it? Guessing that you never tried that.

That reminds me - the other reason that I bought that Creative Multimedia kit (described in my other post), was that I thought that I was getting the DXR2 decoder card too, in the package. Turned out it was just the original, worse-than-crappy, PC-DVD decoder.

 

[bigpow]

Asus mainboards:

Bought A7V, only to find out A7V133 came out a few months later
Bought A7N8X Rev. 1.04 - same thing, Rev. 2.0 after a couple of month

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

Originally posted by: Alkaline5
GEIL 512MB PC3200 CL2. It couldn't even do PC2700 reliably.

this was the ultra series i asume since its CL2? you motherboard is probably the POS, not the ram. I run my Geil 400mhz ultra series at 500mhz no problem.

 

[Arcanedeath]

A Belkin 2 port KVM w/ Intergrated cables, the KVM would not work w/ my Logitech Marble mouse (eg trackball) but worked fine w/ any old Ps2 mouse or even 1st gen optical mice, safe to say this thing went right back to the store where I purchased it.

 

[Techno Pride]

gigabyte i815EP mobo...

can'T run with 512mb ram even though it's officialy spec-ed for it

 

[Pocatello]

All the 56K modems I'd ever bought, since my telephone line can do 33.3Kbps. Now I have 3Mbps cable

 

[nageov3t]

gotta be the 5 vantec stealths that I have in my box. I barely noticed the drop in noise after I used them to replace the stock case fans.

 

[KingofFah]

abit nf7 unstable then died shortly after installation - rma'd. new one had bad southbridge - rma'd. new one didnt have working sound - rma'd. new one had a working lan for a bit, not for long. didn't rma it, and won't unless they pay for shipping. put a nic in it and forgot about it.
also a string of doa abit kr7a's

 

[NewBlackDak]

The most depressing is my 9600Pro's. I'd seen the god reviews, and everyone was talking about them like they were great, so I went and bought 2 to upgrade from an 8500 and a 64MB DDRVIVO. At the time I should have just bought a 9800Pro, and filtered the 8500 down. I could have had a machine with mediocre performance and one with great performance. Instead I now have two with decent performance. Oh well. I guess that's what happens when you buy a mainstream video card instead of the high-end one.

 

[Fuchs]

Mine has to go to stupidity a few years back.

I was making a purchase (computer) and in the description it said AGP compatible. I was slightly confused by this and thought, ah whatever.

I went to the store before I got the machine and bought at the time a decent card (riva tnt2) and brought it home. Of course when I get the machine and open it up.....no AGP slot.....AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH

It was integrated AGP....you have no ideo how pissed I was....hehehe had to by th shotty PCI version which sucked big time...and so did my computer...