What piece of hardware has caused you the MOST headaches in the past year or two?

[CanOWorms]

My Pioneer DVD drive.. I think it's finally dying now. When I put a CD in there, it just starts clicking and clucking like a chicken. :Q

 

[Thor_Sevan]

My Pioneer DVD drive.. I think it's finally dying now. When I put a CD in there, it just starts clicking and clucking like a chicken
Yeah.... I have that problem with some CD-rw disks.... it seems the drive has problems adjusting itself to the disk properly. And sometimes, it makes "click, clock" noises.... heh..

Thor

 

[mrbios]

I not sure who I should blame... either Via or Aureal. This is because my good old Vortex2 sound card would repeatedly crash my AMD Athlon system with the Via KT133A chipset. In my opinion, the sound quality from the Vortex2 was superior to the SB Live! cards. However, it is now happily working away in my Celeron 900 system. The only other thing I can think of off the top of my head are my Pioneer 10X DVD drive. Sometimes it has big problems reading CDs, even real, pressed CDs. Really pisses me off. Oh, and also these old Lite-on cheapie 40x CD-ROMs. In this old place I worked at, we had about 10 or so dead ones sitting one the wall.

Russell "Mr.Bios" Sampson

 

[dukdukgoos]

Soundblaster Live! and IBM 75GXP.

 

[cuteybunny]

hardware is one thing but microsoft windows is the major pain of all. if it screws up, you have to reinstall all over from scratch.

 

[SilverThief]

My 6 year old kid!

 

[HigherGround]

- Logitech Wingman USB flavored gamepad - by the time I got this POS working, which usually involved a few reboots and a solid overhand slam against the wall, I didn't feel like playing anymore :|
- ATI TV Wonder - when it worked, all channels had a gray line going across the top of any capture stream, when it didn't, the display went pink, which was followed by an inevitable reboot. It never worked in Win2k, apparently the NT driver programming was too challenging for ATI engineers :disgust:

 

[Fjive]

SB live value....be6-2 (mostly the on board highpoint ata66)....and my crappy CL tnt2 ultra...
lessons learned : never gonna get a creative based card (both sound and graphics)....and a mobo with on board hard drive controller...

 

[Pabster]

Let's see:

ABIT KT7A.
Shuttle AK31A
Epox 8KHA+

I don't believe it's a coincidence those are all VIA-chipset based boards, either

 

[Ragnarock]

I'll second the Asus A7V133, all my probs with my Kyro II were due to that board. I switched everything out, RMA the card, everything. I ended up with a Shuttle AK31 instead, and love it.

 

[goog]

Combination of my Radeon AIW, Soundblaster Live, and KT7-RAID.
Tried MMC 7.2 today and now sound is screwed up in file playback in MP7 etc.
Reverted back to MMC7.1 changed drivers still doesn't work, argh. DVD, TV etc. has had some problems working right to, but when it does it works great.

And endless variety of USB problems, thanks to VIA. No problems with Highpoint RAID except the inability to install XP.

Scary thing is I'm planning to upgrade to a KT266A and Radeon 8500 eventually, I guess I like a challenge.

Update:
File player sound fixed, but now DVD player software doesn't work again, course it usually doesn't and I do have different DVD player software that'll suffice.

 

[ABErickson]

Yet another ecs k7s5a motherboard.

Also an Epson 740 printer that would always get nozzle plugs. Bought in HP (not my favorite company either) and no more problems.

 

[aka1nas]

My kx133 Procomp mobo. I got it from Fys in one of those AMD bundles. The bundle was $20 more than the CPU by itself. It has been nonstop problems and crashes at least every 2 hours. I finally built my brothers a comp outta it and I dread working on it every time they have a problem with it.

 

[cbuchach]

Definately my 45 GB 75GXP's. Have already RMA'd one and now the other sometimes starts clicking on boot.

 

[neutralizer]

my crappy pcchips mobo that i got for cheap and the 650 cumine that came with it and the onboard crud, corny video card, and sis components. NOT TO MENTION, IT HAD ONE LOUSY PCI SLOT!

 

[jimmyhaha]

ibm 75GXP..
lost partition twice for no reason..

delta dvd-rom in second place..
extremely slow in reading cd/dvd

 

[dionx]

my video card. ever since i got a new computer about 2 months ago, the only thing that makes my computer crash is the video card and only in UT, the only pc game i play. oh well, what can i expect from an $89 vid card. i would have gotten a geforce2MX for about the same price at the time but i dont think i would have gotten as good framerate with my hercules prophet 4500(kryo2), especially at 1280x1024x32 resolution.

 

[Buzzman151]

stupid soundblaster plus via combo

 

[whitelight]

crap amd approved psu failed on me within a month and it took me 2 cpus and 2 mobos later to find out it was the psu.

 

[RanDum72]

Probably the Linksys 4-port router. It had bizarre problems like dropping my Roadrunner connection, corrupting downloads, locking up even when you're not doing anything,
my networked PC's not seeing each other, my 10/100 NIC's refusing to go to 100mbs mode, etc.. I returned three to CompUSA and every single one had the same problem.
The worst part is that the probs are unpredictable(it can happen anytime) and happens on every BIOS revision I used.
Used Netgear afterwards, not a single prob.

Another is the ECS K7S5A. First one ran fine like a dream, then just died suddenly after only two days. The replacement is still running smooth after 3 months.
Another K7S5A I ordered ran for about two months but this one had problems like not working with a Lite-on burner, doesn't want to run under a 266fsb (T-bird 1.2c),
BIOS not saving settings, dead BIOS battery. It suddenly went crazy just two days ago, insisting on booting to a floppy regardless of the BIOS settings.
Thank God Newegg took it back even after two months. I'm still waiting for the replacement with crossed fingers:disgust:

Incidentally, I NEVER had problems with my Abit KT7A-raid paired off with the SBlive! 5.1. A lot of people had problems with Abit boards but I've been lucky so far with two
(KT7A-R and KG7, the most stable boards I've ever owned). Well, my MSI K7T-pro2 was stable as a rock for nearly 9 months but then suddenly died. Mwave sent a replacement
It ran just fine but its now gathering dust, being replaced by 'good sample' ECS K7S5A .

Oh I forgot. Alpha PAL6035 HSinks, especially the ones with the fresh clips, the nastiest, most evil clips I've ever encountered. I chipped two cores and bruised my fingers
trying to install it.

 

[ThisIsMatt]

Some yamaha-xg soundcard...detect, not detect, load drivers, not load drivers, blah blah blah

 

[zzzz]

The infamous black label delta fan. Ironically, it was working correctly.

 

[MWink]

TV tuners in general. I tried to capture a video today and... Well, lets just say I'm feeling a little homicidal right now! :|

 

[NOS440]

Well I would have to say my Classic Athlon 500 with a Asus K7M motherboard and then the Abit board I replaced that with. The system refused to run stable period mark.

 

[ahfung]

Leadtek 7350KDA

Great piece of junk, everything looks good on paper but sucks in reality.