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

[Jayczar]

Definitely the Soundblaster Live!
The Iwill KA-266 falls a close 2nd.

 

[FiveDoubleO]

any VIA chipset

all those patches and PROBLEMS!!!
i hate having to wait for patches!
:|

 

[oldfart]

I dont know why it has taken this long for people to find out how bad the SB Live is. I bought one the first week it came out in '98. I couldn't get it out of my PC fast enough. I replaced it with an MX300 (Aureal Vortex 2). What a difference! Its a shame they still aren't around.

 

[NateSLC]

<< I dont know why it has taken this long for people to find out how bad the SB Live is. I bought one the first week it came out in '98. I couldn't get it out of my PC fast enough. I replaced it with an MX300 (Aureal Vortex 2). What a difference! Its a shame they still aren't around. >>



Well, it works fine now with the default XP drivers. Of course, it's not fully functional, but who would want a POS like it to be?

 

[Dormant]

WOW! I thought every second person would be posting "I HATE MY SoundBlaster Live!".... By Hate I mean one time I turned the power supply off, opened the door of my case and ripped the card out of the PCI slot. I was about to throw it accross the room before I came to my senses. Creative is probably the most incompetant hardware manufacturer I have ever experienced. If any of you own a Via 686B based board and bought it before the patches came out then you'll understand my frustration. The tech support that company offers is about the same quality help you'd get from a midwest inbred hick who considers a Mac classic II the embodyment of perfection. I have owned SB16, Sb128 and an SB live and have had problems with every last one. I had an Aureal Vortex sq1500 that ate CPU clocks for dinner but atleast it ran properly... it was a much better sounding card than my sblive was. I hope Creative goes bankrupt or starts losing piles of cash so a real company can step up to bat. I have used most of the other cards on the market and I'd argue that all of them are superior to the sblive in one way or another. The audigy doesn't interest me at all because I have met the soundcard of my dreams and her name is Hercules Game Theator XP. The GTXP simply dwarfs the sblive in sound quality, cost/performance ratio and most of all features. I am peeved at Hercules for one thing... They didn't include an amplified headphone jack on the GTXP so for users with $300 headphones the volume can be a bit soft.

P.S. After you get a nice set of Cans you forget all about the $500 in speakers sitting next to you...

 

[Diffusion]

My Solbourne 5E/600. Its a late 80s' SPARC based minicomputer that runs a varient of SunOS 4. I don't have an OS for it (DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) owned it and wiped the disks before trashing it). The plastic is starting to fall apart, it won't talk nicely to an external CD-ROM drive, and I am having problems finding a tape for a friend to copy the OS to (Solbourne hasn't made computers in 8 years, the company that bought all the support contracts hasn't supported the machines in 3 years, I think its ok to copy the OS), it turns out that the tapes are also really uncommon, and as such, I have a machine thats about 6 inches higher then a Sun E450 sitting here annoying me. Grr. And it would make quite a nice box if I got it running with an OS, it has dual 40mhz SPARC chips and 208mb of RAM. Its rather sad.

 

[mindless1]

Definitely my Abit VA6 (MVP3 Slot 1)... It would only get through POST once every 15 tries. I swapped in about 20 different memory modules, a PII, Celerons, PIII, different power supplies and cases, anything and everything I and a few others could think of, and even replaced 90% of the caps on it. Then suddenly it did boot up and run fine for almost a week, about 7 times in a row, then went back to working 1/15 again... If only it would NEVER work, i could give up.

Then there's the DLink Webcam. Sometimes works, usually won't, and the codecs for it caused other video apps to crash too. I think it has a clear case so you can better see how much it sucks.

 

[Pabster]

A bit OT (but semi on topic): I wonder how many people who said "Soundblaster Live!" are using VIA-chipset based mainboards?

 

[CrackRabbit]

I think the biggest peice of crap i have ever owned was an Asus K7M-RM, I never got this board to work right, would always run any 3d game at 5 fps or less even after numerous patches, fresh installs and 3 different video cards.
Other than that, Western Digital HDDs i have had 4 need to be RMAed (3 of those were replacements for the original drive).

 

[jamarno]

Panasonic E70 monitor - 4th in 16 months.

1st: bad red convergence from day one. Panasonic tech support said, "I don't know what convergence are."

2nd: white spot in middle of screen at turn-off.

3rd: Panasonic didn't want to honor its advance replacement warranty but eventually ships a refurbished monitor with some unconnected wires inside and a smashed base - smashed by Panasonic before it was placed in the shipping carton.

4th: Capacitor not soldered, causes brightness to shift intermittently, front bezel had obvious repair (amateurish and with sandpaper marks), and a shock or RF shield is missing.

 

[grrl]

Maybe I'm lucky, but I haven't had any major hardware problems and I currently have an Abit KT7A with the SBlive! 5.1.

Printers though have always been a pain. I got tired of HP cartidges that leaked ink after refilling and the price for new ones (Lexmark's too) is pure banditry.

I'd go laser, but they're too pricey.

 

[Blain]

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



That's an easy one...

56k modems... Any flavor :|

 

[brett1]

Hercules Game Theater XP. no doubt in my mind. buggiest hardware with non-existant driver support....