What was the worst computer you ever bought and why?

[+OLD CS1]

Every NetBook ever.

 

Fortunately, I never actually owned one myself, by many of my customers were enamored by the possibility of a 9-inch "laptop" for $150 to run QuickBooks on.  Until they tried running QuickBooks. Or anything for that matter.  Not my problem, though, since I advised against every one which was purchased, but they went and got it anyway because apparently I had no clue what I was talking about, until I did.

 

I take it back. I have a Dell Mini 9 here that I was using for Kali. Worked pretty well after I upgraded the RAM and put a 5GHz-capable wireless card into it.  It is awfully dated at this point.  Would not mind re-loading Windows XP on it, but I have not been able to dig up an XP for UMPC CD.

[Cebus Capucinis]

Netbooks make for great, cheap 8 bit portable emulation machines. Other than that, complete wastes. And even then, there's plenty of equivalent options now that are more portable, so even that use is questionable these days.

[atarian1]

My worst computer was my first PC clone. After finally coming to terms that using my Atari ST/Falcon for everything was over, I needed internet access. So, I got a motherboard had a VIA chipset, but I got an Intel CPU. I thought it was good and the dealer recommended it. I was also going to use it for digital audio recording too since I was into it on my Falcon, but it was just too slow by now. I also got a nice ATI All-in-Wonder to potentially dip my feet into video work too. For sound, I got...damn, I forgot which one! But it was a nice 24-bit moderately high end sound card (Soundblaster compatible too), and even bought the Pro version of some digital audio software that I paid extra for in order to take advantage of the 24-bit sound. I plugged in the sound card, turned on the PC...nothing. WTF? It would not boot up, but if I remove the card, it worked fine. Took it to my dealer, and he couldn't get it work too. He told me to return it, but I can't, it's been opened already. Needless to say, I was royally pissed at wasting $400 on a sound card that didn't work. I later found out that I should have gotten a motherboard with an Intel chipset because they are most compatible with high end sound cards. I went back to my dealer and told him about this, and he heard about this, and I'm like, "Why didn't you tell me this when I bought it?" (Yes, I told him I was going to use the PC for digital audio). His response - "Why don't you get a Soundblaster? That's good enough. You don't need all that high-end stuff." Blah. Blah. STFU.

 

After that, that's it, NO MORE PCs. PCs SUCK! Wasted $400 on a soundcard that didn't work with my PC AND wasted $400 buying the high end software when I could have gotten the low end version for $100 if I knew I would be forced to settle with a Soundblaster. I pretty much lost interest after that. I toyed with the Mac, but I HATE the (CPU+monitor in one case) iMac design and the PowerMacs and Powerbooks were too expensive. When the Mac Mini came out, I bought one and never looked back.

[Frozone212]

anything on tandy? anyone?

[Keatah]

Well.. I think I narrowly avoided getting into the TRS-80 quagmire. In the late 70's when I was looking to get some kind of home computer. Any home computer. I started looking at TRS-80 Model I and later on the Model II and III. I was also considering a KIM-1 and Apple II.

 

My gramma talked me out of the Model 1 because it didn't have color. So I ended up with an Apple II just prior to the turn of the 70's into the 80's. It was the correct choice. And my first peripheral was the Microsoft 16K RamCard. I think I got it prior to getting the computer itself. So cool! Anyhow I did like the TRS-80 stuff. All the accessories. Nicely done up and packaged Voice Synthesizer and Voice Recognition boxes. Really appealing to a kid.

 

But the gramma was right.. Some 40 years later, now, I got to playing around with trs80gp, a nice emulator, and I know for a fact I'd have been quite bored with the B/W graphics and the complexity of the disk drives. The Apple II just seems so much more familiar and exudes common sense in its design and how the user interacts with it. Very intuitive and versatile by comparison. A win!

 

Can you just imagine a shit-faced pre-teen whining about no games on the Model II ??!?!?! Da'fuk!

[masteries]

A Raspberry Pi 400, bought as multimedia center for the living room

 

Computationally is a good piece of equipment,

 

But system reliability is very poor:

 

-> First, the keyboard stops working anymore. A rare USB failure message appears each time you boot up the keyboard cased computer.

-> Second, the micro HDMI ports stop to work briefly after the first failure.

 

Currently it is sleeping in his original box 

 

I am planning to repair and modify the micro HDMI to full HDMI,

but I need to find spare time,

 

 

Now, the multimedia center for the living room is a 2010 dated Dell XPS Studio 13 inches laptop (an Intel 2.66 GHz Core Duo with 4 GB DDR3 RAM).

A bit outdated, but useful for Kodi entertainment.

 

 

Edited December 17, 2021 by masteries

[Flojomojo]

On 12/14/2021 at 8:11 PM, doctorclu said:

Wanna see something "cool" in relation to this thread?   Acer AND Packard Bell having a baby...

 

I think it's somewhat neat that Acer out of Taiwan was able to absorb all the crappy companies (Gateway, Packard Bell, eMachines) and make reasonably high quality, low cost stuff. They're definitely low end, but I've never had a hardware problem with the many Acer things I've used, so long as I set my expectations low. The margins are too tight for crap companies to survive nowadays. 

 

I am mildly curious about Amiga but I think I missed the boat, its time has passed and its hard to look at it since I don't have nostalgia for it. I've tried!

[zzip]

5 hours ago, masteries said:

A Raspberry Pi 400, bought as multimedia center for the living room

 

Computationally is a good piece of equipment,

I've had a Pi 400 for about a year.   It's been good so far,  but for the price I guess it's not surprising that the keyboard wouldn't be high quality ?

 

14 hours ago, Cebus Capucinis said:

Netbooks make for great, cheap 8 bit portable emulation machines. Other than that, complete wastes. And even then, there's plenty of equivalent options now that are more portable, so even that use is questionable these days.

The netbook wave hit just before smart phones and tablets went mainstream.   For the time, they served a purpose that you couldn't do with an inexpensive device,  but now they don't make much sense anymore.

[Keatah]

I remember building an AMD K6-2 xxx Something.. It had an ALI chipset on the mobo and a Canopus 16MB TNT videoboard. The whole system just sucked ass. All parts seemed to deviate slightly away from the WinTel standard. Just enough to make it unstable from time to time. Like for example it couldn't properly run Microsoft Space Simulator, the bitplanage was wrong, 15 vs 16, thus fucking up the palette. Upon investigation it seemed something in the chipset kept the videocard from working reliably in 16-bit mode because of something in the BIOS - which changing kinda sorta fixed it, but then generated another issue. It was all so long ago. All I remember is MSS was pink and orange.

 

I suppose it was a learning experience to keep away from substandard parts.

Edited December 18, 2021 by Keatah

[Cebus Capucinis]

The past few years Acer has been surprisingly decent. They've really put effort into quality control. I mean I'm ASUS 4 LYFE YO but Acer's not as awful anymore. MSI really upped the game too.

[mr_me]

10 hours ago, Keatah said:

I remember building an AMD K6-2 xxx Something.. It had an ALI chipset on the mobo and a Canopus 16MB TNT videoboard. The whole system just sucked ass. All parts seemed to deviate slightly away from the WinTel standard. Just enough to make it unstable from time to time. Like for example it couldn't properly run Microsoft Space Simulator, the bitplanage was wrong, 15 vs 16, thus fucking up the palette. Upon investigation it seemed something in the chipset kept the videocard from working reliably in 16-bit mode because of something in the BIOS - which changing kinda sorta fixed it, but then generated another issue. It was all so long ago. All I remember is MSS was pink and orange.

 

I suppose it was a learning experience to keep away from substandard parts.

I had an Asus AMD K6-2 ALI computer, probably with ATI graphics.  I think that was around 1999/2000.   It was rock solid, used it for years.

 

In the mid 2000s work got some new Intel based no-name computers for the office.  They would crash occasionally.  It was a bit of a problem.  Took me a while to figure it out but turning off cpu hyper-threading solved it.

[+x=usr(1536)]

On 12/16/2021 at 10:02 PM, Cebus Capucinis said:

Netbooks make for great, cheap 8 bit portable emulation machines. Other than that, complete wastes. And even then, there's plenty of equivalent options now that are more portable, so even that use is questionable these days.

The one thing that they're still useful for: they're something you can bring up a ladder with you to perform <insert networking task here> without giving a damn if it takes a 15-foot fall onto polished concrete.

 

Having said that, living in the age of the $199 Wal-Mart laptop makes it something of a game of diminishing returns.

[Turbo-Torch]

On 12/17/2021 at 2:04 AM, Frozone212 said:

anything on tandy? anyone?

 

Outside of the Model 2000 (for home environment), there was nothing to hate about Tandy.

My uncle gave me a Model III when I was 12 and it's still going strong after 40 years.  I'll never let that one go.

The I, III, 4, CoCo, 100 and 1000 line were amazing systems back in the day for the home user.

 

I had a decent job while in high school and bought a 1000 EX when things started moving to PC compatibles.  Loved that computer.  256K out of the box, 3 voice sound plus another noise channel and TGA graphics which blew away CGA (all the good games back then supported Tandy's better graphics and sound).  It was 100% IBM compatible for people who weren't computer illiterate.  If you didn't know what a DOS config.sys file was, then not even a real IBM would work well for you.  And if you couldn't read a software box that mentioned a certain version of DOS was required, once again, you'll have issues and should have stuck with a computer that used plug in cartridges.

I upgraded the EX rather cheaply to 640K with the Plus expansion board and added the external 3.5" floppy.  It did have ISA expansion slots but they were proprietary connectors (called Plus) and unfortunately Tandy never offered a hard drive system for it.

 

Eventually I wanted a hard drive, so I sold the EX and used that money towards a 1000 SL.  That was another kickass computer ahead of the game.  384K out of the box and like $50 bucks to bump it to 640K by simply populating the MB.  It had a faster 8086 processor and 8087 math coprocessor socket.  Not only did it have the awesome TGA graphics, but Enhanced TGA which allowed 16 colors in hi-res mode and it was also Hercules compatible.  Same 3 voice sound but it also had a DAC for high quality sound samples.  This wasn't just for sound effects in games, you could input and edit your own sound samples with a patch cord.  It also had an enhanced keyboard, which was much nicer and had more keys than the original 1000 line and far better than pretty much any clone on the market.  The expansion slots were normal ISA so I was able to add a 32mb hard card and a Creative Labs GameBlaster.  For a system that was well under $1,000 in the late 80s and ran any software you threw at it, it was hard to beat.  Although, for some reason, I liked my 1000 EX better.  As a matter of fact, I just recently bought a pristine boxed EX and will be posting about it in the Tandy section soon.

 

The biggest disappointment was my Tandy 2000.  It was a unique situation where I bought it while I owned the EX.  

Radio Shack used the 2000s to run their stores and started to upgrade in the late 80s.  My local store offered the whole thing to me for $100.  It was the end all be all system with every single item in the catalog installed in it or on it.

Internal HD that allowed both 80 track floppies to remain. Crazy amount of memory.  Hi-res color graphics card for CAD, CM-1 color hi-res monitor, 1200 modem and the list went on.  It was a $10K system according to the prices in their catalog. 

 

I knew it ran MSDOS and ASSumed it was reasonably IBM compatible due to the way it was advertised for years.  When I got it home, I realized it was the worst $100 I ever spent.  Yeah, it could run MSDOS and IBM programs...as long as those programs didn't make use graphics.

I ended up letting my best friend take it to his house so we could play TradeWars 2000 on the local BBSs and never got it back.  Till this day, he keeps telling me he's going to give it back because it's still at his parent's house. lol

 

I do want to say, the 2000 was NOT a crap system.  It was an 80186 business system with mind blowing specs when it was introduced.  There were specific versions of popular business software made for it, and in the right office environment, not much could touch it.  I think of it more like the Model II business series machines.

[JamesD]

On 12/14/2021 at 6:03 PM, OLD CS1 said:

Bruh.  WordPerfect 4, which I used up until I got my AA in 2000, was superior to anything I ever used on an Apple.  And I used to swap Turbo Pascal and COBOL programs between my Amiga and the school computers effortlessly.  What the heck were you doing??

Pretty sure he was looking to copy something

[JamesD]

15 hours ago, Keatah said:

I remember building an AMD K6-2 xxx Something.. It had an ALI chipset on the mobo and a Canopus 16MB TNT videoboard. The whole system just sucked ass. All parts seemed to deviate slightly away from the WinTel standard. Just enough to make it unstable from time to time. Like for example it couldn't properly run Microsoft Space Simulator, the bitplanage was wrong, 15 vs 16, thus fucking up the palette. Upon investigation it seemed something in the chipset kept the videocard from working reliably in 16-bit mode because of something in the BIOS - which changing kinda sorta fixed it, but then generated another issue. It was all so long ago. All I remember is MSS was pink and orange.

 

I suppose it was a learning experience to keep away from substandard parts.

I had a K6-2 system.  Never had a problem with it, but it was a little slower than some of the intel systems, but they were more expensive.  DFI motherboard, not sure what chipset.
I handed it down to my brother, who handed it down to his son who promptly killed it.  My nephew is good at that.

[JamesD]

On 12/15/2021 at 2:53 AM, Keatah said:

Ahh bullshit on that.. My old fart had a Packard Bell 286/12, and compared to the computers sold in toystores and department stores, it was pretty good. Solid construction. IBM compatible. Crisp text. Could play any of the period games that were rated for a 286 without issue. Solid product overall.

 

People like to hate on Packard Bell because of conservative specs and the name. Just something to hate for no good reason. But conservative and pedestrian specs are thoroughly mainstream and really do avoid the instability of something more cutting edge. And definitely no lanboi overclockerzing shit either!

 

What an ass. The store owner stripped the machine of bundled software? I'dve landed his tootsie in a small claims court because I was bored - not giving me the pack-ins to play with.

Packard Bell was horrible.  We refused to work on them because they were such crap, and when TurboTax went to online registration, 9 out of 10 calls from people having issues were Packard Bells. I'm probably being kind with that number, pretty sure every tech call I handled was Packard Bell.
 

[+x=usr(1536)]

For the utter garbage pile: every Internet appliance I had to test between 1999 and 2001 where the manufacturer had decided to save money by using Cyrix CPUs.  Oh, and disk-on-chip storage, which in those days was good for perhaps ten or twelve read/write cycles before they'd eat the pavement.

 

We did the same thing with 'our' devices: they were 'ours' in the sense of them running the OS and software we had developed, but the hardware was actually specified (after minimal consultation with us), designed, and built by outside companies.

 

Cyrix couldn't design reliable hardware to save their lives, at least not after NatSemi bought them out.  I have no idea if they were any better or not before that happened, but the MediaGX (with which I had to work far too much) was a massive turd of a chip.  We sent them a completed pre-production machine that had a reproducible crash that only happened on their CPU, and after their engineers presumably looked at it for a couple of weeks, their response essentially boiled down to, "huh, that shouldn't be happening."

 

 

[+OLD CS1]

This may or may not qualify is a computer, in the traditional sense.  But Palms, I think, were considered pocket computers, and I had a Palm LifeDrive.  I actually wrote a love letter once, called "10 Reasons I Hate My Palm LifeDrive."

 

I tried to use it as a surrogate for my laptop, for email, web browsing, calendar management, even web-based configurations of things.  It crashed all the damn time.  The Garnet operating system was too easily confused by the transition between WiFi and Bluetooth networking.  It was just terrible.

[wierd_w]

A samsung chromebook 3. (Celes)

 

I needed something to do charting on. And it sufficed.  It has 2gb of RAM and a 16gb eMMC storage. Celeron processor in the 1.6ghz range. Terrible integrated video.

 

I wound up installing mr chromebox uefi on it, then loading it with xubuntu, turned in zram swap, and cooked a microSD card to serve up /home.

 

It is "alright" for very old retro titles, DosBox hosted Dos games, etc, but is very unstable/janky. (The wifi and bluetooth produce too much emi inside the plastic clamshell, which then scrambles both and puts them in an insane state that requires a hard poweroff to correct. I 'fixed' it by disabling both, and then putting a low profile USB device on. In addition to shite electrical engineering, it also has bizarre throttling in its microcontroller. This leads to some curious behavior in some games. the sound chip is hard to get configured. I have to abuse an alsa config file to torture it into halfass working. Similar story with the integrated touchpad.)

 

Mr chromebox outright says not to get one for this reason. (Bad user experience, chasing ghosts, anomalous transient behaviors, etc)

 

What it WAS, was 90$ on clearance, and I got that much use out of it.

 

Replaced it with a samsung series 9 ultrabook from ebay.

 

Edited December 19, 2021 by wierd_w

[Crazy Climber]

On 12/16/2021 at 10:57 AM, x=usr(1536) said:

Mattel Aquarius.

 

This was the machine that my parents obtained for me by sitting through a timeshare presentation.  

I think you are the first person I've ever heard that actually owned one of these back when it was new. The fact that your parents got it from sitting through a timeshare presentation makes the story even cooler. 

On 12/16/2021 at 1:44 PM, gilsaluki said:

That's why I still have a flip phone.  

Was all set to get one and my wife bought me another smartphone. She must have thought she couldn't get a hold of me at a moments notice with a flip. Jokes on her, I leave it on silent...

On 12/16/2021 at 5:18 PM, Razzie.P said:

Pro Tip.   

 

 

I've actually done this for cooling boards on CNC machinery. Works pretty good and gives just enough of a hillbilly vibe that people don't ask me to fix their problems with their machines at work

On 12/17/2021 at 9:58 PM, Cebus Capucinis said:

The past few years Acer has been surprisingly decent. They've really put effort into quality control. I mean I'm ASUS 4 LYFE YO but Acer's not as awful anymore. MSI really upped the game too.

Haha, yeah, those early Acers were horseshit. They were near the equivalent of a travel/road trip comnect 4 game

[+davidcalgary29]

On 12/17/2021 at 12:17 AM, atarian1 said:

My worst computer was my first PC clone. After finally coming to terms that using my Atari ST/Falcon for everything was over, I needed internet access. So, I got a motherboard had a VIA chipset, but I got an Intel CPU. I thought it was good and the dealer recommended it. I was also going to use it for digital audio recording too since I was into it on my Falcon, but it was just too slow by now. I also got a nice ATI All-in-Wonder to potentially dip my feet into video work too. For sound, I got...damn, I forgot which one! But it was a nice 24-bit moderately high end sound card (Soundblaster compatible too), and even bought the Pro version of some digital audio software that I paid extra for in order to take advantage of the 24-bit sound. I plugged in the sound card, turned on the PC...nothing. WTF? It would not boot up, but if I remove the card, it worked fine. Took it to my dealer, and he couldn't get it work too. He told me to return it, but I can't, it's been opened already. Needless to say, I was royally pissed at wasting $400 on a sound card that didn't work. I later found out that I should have gotten a motherboard with an Intel chipset because they are most compatible with high end sound cards. I went back to my dealer and told him about this, and he heard about this, and I'm like, "Why didn't you tell me this when I bought it?" (Yes, I told him I was going to use the PC for digital audio). His response - "Why don't you get a Soundblaster? That's good enough. You don't need all that high-end stuff." Blah. Blah. STFU.

 

After that, that's it, NO MORE PCs. PCs SUCK! Wasted $400 on a soundcard that didn't work with my PC AND wasted $400 buying the high end software when I could have gotten the low end version for $100 if I knew I would be forced to settle with a Soundblaster. I pretty much lost interest after that. I toyed with the Mac, but I HATE the (CPU+monitor in one case) iMac design and the PowerMacs and Powerbooks were too expensive. When the Mac Mini came out, I bought one and never looked back.

Amen! I bought an AT clone in 1989 which -- with monitor -- cost me over $2000 at the time, and that was essentially my summer job savings. Okay, WordPerfect was nice on an 80-column screen, but I spent far more time wrestling with drivers for the AdLib soundcard (and the CD-ROM drive) than playing the games I wanted. And I can't believe how disappointing Barbarian on the PC was. I just wasn't into the ST or the Amiga, though, and wanted the clone for its huge DOS library. What I really wanted was a 65816 130XE with a better keyboard.

[wierd_w]

4 hours ago, davidcalgary29 said:

Amen! I bought an AT clone in 1989 which -- with monitor -- cost me over $2000 at the time, and that was essentially my summer job savings. Okay, WordPerfect was nice on an 80-column screen, but I spent far more time wrestling with drivers for the AdLib soundcard (and the CD-ROM drive) than playing the games I wanted. And I can't believe how disappointing Barbarian on the PC was. I just wasn't into the ST or the Amiga, though, and wanted the clone for its huge DOS library. What I really wanted was a 65816 130XE with a better keyboard.

I worked at a mom&pop computer and repair place during that era.  While the CRTs were indeed expensive, that made sense, given how much it cost to ship and transport them.

 

The computers themselves, I had a very stern occupational lesson about.  I almost never went with name-brand anythings for most of the 90s and early 2000s. (An aztec sound galaxy worked just as well as, and configured identically to, a much costlier soundblaster 16.  I *DID* fork out for and SB32, but only because there was no generic.) I saw the pain and suffering that was Packard Bell and co, and said "Hard Pass."  I was very much a DIY system builder back then. (I still have battle scars on my hands from packard bells, and their horrible razor sharp edges, cramped designs, and terrible drive retention mechanisms. I once cut my left thumb terribly, trying to shave down a standard thickness 5.25" bay drive-rail set, so that they could fit inside the 3/4 thickness provision inside a customer's packard bell. In addition to being deathtraps for hands, they also were just terrible machines, with onboard cache modules not being present straight up disabled-- the use of terrible components (there's generic components, and then there are TERRIBLE components-- and PB used the latter religiously), etc.  The lesson to me was clear: Don't buy a boxed PC. It will suck.)

 

I was not really a fan of Apple products, because of the "You must wear your mittens, citizen!" nature of their products, and I am a natural tinkerer.  In addition to having the lid bolted down, and purposeful nonstandard case components (for that aesthetic experience that Jobs was so enamored about), even when you did pry open the OS to look underneath, there wasn't much to adjust anyway. The lack of a robust software ecosystem, and the seemingly purposeful "pay to play!" nature of all of apple's products (No, really, your apple branded scsi drive, is just a normal scsi drive. The only thing special about it is 4 bytes in the drive firmware. No, I wont pay 20% higher markup for apple logo. No, your purposefully crippled drive setup program that looks for those 4 bytes before it will partition the drive is bullshit, that's why all your customers use the hacked disk tools package, or use Mount Everest to set it up. No, you are not "Premium" for doing that. Stop pretending you are) really turned me off.

 

I tended to be a very shrewd buyer, buying very specific bits of kit, for very specific reasons.  I stayed away from BestBuy, Circuit City, CompUSA and pals, because I would argue with the sales reps, and it wasn't pretty.

 

 

Anymore though, aside from things like chromebooks filling the "Extreme lower-end", and doing it poorly, computers are a very mature product, and such shenanigans are less frequent.  Instead, you have issues with component makers using purposefully confusing naming conventions, (Looking at you nVidia), OEMs leaning far too heavily on integrated components (Basically EVERY laptop built on an Intel CPU these days), etc. 

 

I still do the DIY thing, because I am still that natural tinkerer, but there actually are some good boxed units these days. Usually they are "engineering workstations", which can be juiced up, but they can frequently be obtained reasonably inexpensively.

 

 

[+x=usr(1536)]

9 hours ago, Crazy Climber said:

I think you are the first person I've ever heard that actually owned one of these back when it was new. The fact that your parents got it from sitting through a timeshare presentation makes the story even cooler. 

Apparently this was how a chunk of them made it out into the wild.  I have no idea which timeshare presentation it was that they went to view, but Southern California was something of a dumping ground for unsold units towards / after the end of its retail life.

[digdugnate]

On 12/14/2021 at 11:06 AM, zzip said:

My friend got one of those Tandy 1000's, forget the exact model, but it was compact with a 5.25" floppy on the side.  It was around 89/90 so it was already showing its age.  I just remember it was kind of a pain, and not fully compatible.   He'd buy some games that appeared to be in spec and they'd just refuse to run.  And then to make it worse Electronics Boutique would refuse to return it because it was open-box.  

It really made me appreciate my ST

That's the Tandy 1000 EX    We had that one and its brother the HX, which had a 3 1/2" floppy drive.  I'm still not sure to this day why my folks bought these, lol

[Cebus Capucinis]

Everyone knows:

 

The worst computer was whatever everyone else was using.

The best computer was whatever YOU were using.

 

(But really, I'm surprised there isn't as much fanboyism in the computing world as the console world.)