what has been the most unreliable h/w and s/w component in your systems?

[benjamit]

for me h/w has been hdds, even quantums and maxtors, haven't tried ibm (next time)

and for s/w drivers (chipsets and third party) and OSs (win 98 and sometimes win2k)

what's yours?

 

[loosbrew]

so far the most unreliable piece of crap ive used was the hpt370 controller on my abit kt7-r!
the board in itself rules, and has no problems whatsoever, but its when i try to use the damn hpt370 is when i get freeze ups and corrupted registry files..yada yada. i even reinstalled windows without a SBL and kept it off. its sitting on my kitchen table right now!

S/W?
hmmm....Groupwise...

loosbrew

 

[shathal]

My WinModem !"£)(*!"£(* is a junk.

Drivers cause a bit of a problem - esp. GFX drivers (since - wise as they were - MS decided to throw those at the Kernel level).

Biggest problem would be the OS (Windows 9X), as Linux is fine, and W2K bearable - but I need 98/DOS-elements to play my older games.

 

[AMCRambler]

Crapiest piece of hardware I ever had is an I/O Magic Surfer 56K modem. Right out of the box using the drivers on the cd it came with I installed it. It dialed up and connected great to my ISP. But I would get kicked off every 10-20 minutes or so. For the longets time I thought it was my ISP and sent them messages asking for help. They told me to try upgrading the drivers for my modem, but of course the drivers on I/O's site are the same one's I have. I went back to using my 33.6 and gave up on the 56K. Then I found out about Anandtech orums and made a post. Sure enough somebody new that I/O doesn't make their own stuff but rather buys the hardware from other companies and laps their label on it. He pointed me to the site for the true manufacturer for my modem and I was able to download some good drivers and now it works great. I guess realy the modem wasn't so bad as the company that was selling it.

 

[benjamit]

yes i know some people running rad hat and i have red hat at home but havn't installed it since i don't want to bother looking for drivers, potentialy bad drivers

it's gotten to the point that i don't want to install additional h/w because even the manufacturer's drivers might be bad

 

[SleepyGuy]

most bothersome piece of h/w i've ever had was my aiw radeon... damn thing just wouldn't work right and you had to "tweak" it to get some decent results. I'm using it now and it runs fine but the trouble i had to goe through to make it work... i'd never do that again!

 

[Geekbabe]

Worst piece of hardware?

Epox 7KXA rev 3 motherboard, that thing should have been named "crash city"

Epox provided such poor customer service and support that my blood pressure rises just thinking about the POS !

 

[erikiksaz]

for me i would say Cdroms. those bloody things keep on screwing up on me.

 

[Workin']

Only pieces of hardware I ever truly hated were a Netgear FA311 NIC and a Diamond Supramax 56k winmodem.

The software list is too long to enumerate.

 

[dowxp]

hmm. netgear nics. they cant freaking talk to realtek chips and cable\dsl modems!

via. thats whats bad. =)

 

[Zepper]

Any version of Windows wins the unreliable software crown hands down. I've had very little hardware problems on my own machines, but then I've been a tech for over 15 years--know what to buy and how to keep it running.
.bh.

 

[tboo]

Unreliable hw: USB on certain VIA boards.
Unreliable sw: Windows Media Player 7.1

 

[Bozz]

Lets look back and see if any of you can actually agree with this (If you have been around for 10 or so years in the industry!)

Unreliable SW: Microsoft <anything> excluding Windoze NT4 and NT5 (2000)
Reliable SW: Linux Redhat
Reliable SW: DR-DOS (Far superior to MSDOS)
Reliable SW: MS-DOS 5 (Had to put my fav M$ OS in)
Reliable SW: FreeBSD
Reliable SW:

64K MEMORY FREE
OK
10 PRINT &quot;RELIABLE!&quot;
20 GOTO 10
RUN

LOL!!

Unreliable HW: Any NIC with Realtek chipset
Unreliable HW #2: Any K5 or K6 AMD products (The 386 imitators were actually quite good)
Unreliable HW #3: WD HD's (all after 1Gb)
Unreliable HW #4: CPU Fans
Unreliable HW #5: Inkjet printers with more than 500 pages on the total count
Unreliable HW #6: Those stupid terminators on a coax P2P network
Unreliable HW #7: Did I mention Realtek NW cards?
Unreliable HW #8: Oak Technology, Tseng Labs ISA/VLB VGA cards
Unreliable HW #9: Seagate HD's up to 420Mb

Reliable HW: My computer CASE! It has NEVER let me down!
Reliable HW #2: The power cord, never failed!
Reliable HW #3: That 12&quot; IBM VGA monitor, 13yo and still going!
Reliable HW #4: Connor CP3000 40Mb HD in the 386 hooked up to the above monitor running M$DOS 5, still going strong!
Reliable HW #5: My Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX81 and Tandy TRS80: All still working!
Reliable HW #6: My Computer desk, never broken down!
Reliable HW #7: Trident TVGA8900 ISA 1Mb SVGA card or Trident TGUI9440 VLB, never had ANY troubles with them

Geez how I can look back and see how good computing USED to be... I could begin describing the great and not so great Unix based HW and SW from yesteryear but I dont think anybody would know what I'm talking about Hopefully some ppl around heere will have been around for many years to agree with me on some of the above

 

[Apex]

Easily the nut between the monitor and the computer chair is the most unreliable in my experience. Deletes stuff with no warning, hoses OS's, fries components, etc.

 

[BlueScreenVW]

Phillips 4x4x32 CDRW. Got rid of it pretty fast, though.

 

[bacillus]

my floppy drive!

 

[ukDave]

most unreliable = monitors and floppy mothers.

 

[Bozz]

LOL > Apex!!

We often use the I D ten T error, if you write it down on paper or the screen substituting &quot;ten&quot; for &quot;10&quot; then you'll get it... great when you are supporting a client and you realise it's a BDU error (Brain Dead User)

 

[Spagina]

My Netgear network card. Was causing either an I/O or Memory Address conflict with my sound card and caused my games to crash all the time in Windows 2000. I'm damn glad I finally figured it out and got rid of it. Now it's rock solid.

 

[HellRaven]

Bozz,


<< LOL > Apex!!
We often use the I D ten T error, if you write it down on paper or the screen substituting &quot;ten&quot; for &quot;10&quot; then you'll get it... great when you are supporting a client and you realise it's a BDU error (Brain Dead User) >>


Heh, another fellow tech support person I presume. I often toss around the term &quot;Error between chair and keyboard&quot;

Anyway, my most troublesome piece of hardware:

Well I haven't really had any really notable trouble with hardware thus far. Just the normal setup or reliability problems here and there. Nothing really bad though.

Most troublesome pieces of software:

Windows 95/98/ME - Doing tech support for a major ISP has made me really hate these OS's even more than I did before.

Factory loaded software on PC's - Everything from Nortons or McAfee Anti-Virus to Realplayer to MSN is loaded up on these damn systems. Loads down the resources really badly and they take forever to reboot.

 

[jaywallen]

HW: I've had pretty good experiences with hardware for about thirty years, but I hardly ever buy cheap stuff. I did have an HP USB CD-RW drive lose its ability to create rewritable CDs about two months out of warranty. I guess that's the worst experience I've had hardware-wise.

SW: ANY DOS version of Ashton Tate's dBase from version 3.x on up. I'm delighted the company died. They deserved it richly! Anyone who thinks that they've had bad luck with a recent database system ought to try trusting a project to an old dBase system! These systems had the uncanny ability to subtly corrupt months' worth of data without ever giving a clue. When the final failure becomes apparent you have to go back several months to find a usable backup. It couldn't have been more disastrous if they had deliberately designed it to screw up. And they KNEW about the problem. We were paying extra for their &quot;Tech Notes&quot; support. They didn't report the issue to their customers because they didn't want to &quot;shake customers' faith&quot; in the software!!! 6@st@rds!!!

 

[MrWhiteUK]

HD: Asus A7V

SW: MediaPlayer7.1, ATi DVD 4.1, WinME


The only one I still use is the Ati player.

Mediaplayer has ALWAYS sucked.

 

[MrWhiteUK]

HD: Asus A7V

SW: MediaPlayer7.1, ATi DVD 4.1, WinME


The only one I still use is the Ati player.

Mediaplayer has ALWAYS sucked.

 

[Rifter]

My old SB Live.

 

[chuckieland]

the biggest piece crap i ever own
is PC100 motherboard with PCchip chipset
damn do they know how to crash