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ECS motherboards
Have never had any luck with them. maybe it's also because our ECS supplier is useless..
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I remember a ECS K7S5A a friend of mine gave me... I tried to set up a 2nd PC with it... Athlon XP 1800+, 512 Mo DDR...

that was a real nightmare ! it was extremely unstable, and had lots of difficulties to detect hardware like network adapters... i finally replaced it with a 30€ Asrock k7s8x... it now works fine !
 
That's odd since the ECS K7S5A is considered one of the most stable motherboards built for Socket A. I built easily a dozen computers with that board and most of them still run today. It was not a great overclocker but very stable, the only time I had a problem with one was one that was defective and it was good as soon as it was replaced. I also had one blow it's caps but it was three or four years old by then.
 
Ill be part of the chorus and agree with those who have had grief with Maxtor HDD's. I have gone through two in one system, thank goodness for warranty!

I personally hate the Geforce FX series of cards, so dissapointing! Dawn of cinematic gaming, Pah! In OpenGL they were okay, however in other cases a Geforce 4MX440 would run on par with an FX5600 in some cases (albeit without shaders), and a friend's GFIII TI500 would always appear the better performer. My 5600 would revert to SM1.1 in Half Life 2, which was a bit annoying
 
That's odd since the ECS K7S5A is considered one of the most stable motherboards built for Socket A. I built easily a dozen computers with that board and most of them still run today. It was not a great overclocker but very stable, the only time I had a problem with one was one that was defective and it was good as soon as it was replaced. I also had one blow it's caps but it was three or four years old by then.
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huh??? the K7S5A was one of the CHEAPEST Skt A boards... and many people bought them because of that

my experience w/ the board is limited to 2 DOA boards 2 different friends of mine got from newegg

NF2 motherboards are generally considered the most stable w/ all due respect.
 
OK, here's my votes for the worst:

BTC optical drives--usually marketed as I/O Magic or other various house brands--are they even still in business?? I know they've dropped support for their optical drives....

Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop. Mine failed the motherboard at 15 months (three months out of warranty); replacement was so expensive I was better off eBaying the remainder as parts instead of fixing it.

Compaq computers. Too many failures that involve proprietary parts and systems.

edit (addition): for what it's worth to the ongoing ECS K7S5A debate, I've build at least 6 or 8 systems with K7S5A's, and I've had very good luck with them. Cheap but effective.
 
Stay away from Msi motherboards. they dont support crap and there tech support is the worest. Also Ocz memory is not that great either.
 
I would like to disagree with you about MSI: I have a Socket A MSI board, of which I had misflashed the BIOS (my fault for not using the correct BIOS image). I contacted them, sent them the chip, and they re-flashed it for me. All I had to pay for was the stamps on the envelopes.
 
How long ago was that ? I had my issues about 8 months ago. One issues I heared about was from friend that there 939 desktop boards do not support. Opteron 1xx chips
 
Ok well i have spent years and years building computers by the dozon using alot of different hardware managing tech departments in computer shops.

VIA - SIS - not going into it way to much to type out.

Lighton - one shop i worked at only sold this crap i never had to replace more drives then that one shop

MSI - see light on

Maxtor - i pretty much exclusivly use hitachi drives (formerly IBM) not because they tend to always fail on me in hte past 13 years but i ran identical drives (spec wise) from maxtor and ibm and the maxtor computer was always sluggish with the only difference being the drive. My two deathstar drives still work to this day they had a problem with hybernate or something where the heads would get stuck. Lucky for me i turn off all the power save modes and sleep modes the second windows comes up.

OEM computers - unless i dont really need a power house computer of course.

Microsoft mice - i only owned two but they died vary fast so i stick with logitech since i havent had one die yet and i think i have 6 now all being used oldest one is about 4 years old now.

Linksys anything - to many nightmares im still scared to talk about it.

Any PSU that comes with a case (i mean the $50 cheapo crap you can buy at most computer stores)

there was a brand of monitors from way back i cant remember for some reason i keep trying to say CTX even though i sent probly 500 of those out and never got one back but it was a 3 letter brand starting with a c that i cannot remember whatever that is dont buy that either even though im sure they went out of business since i cant find a refference to it on google.

FIC - the motherboard we used on the 500 compuers we sent out. I dont know if they are still making motherboards as this was a while ago but those were possibly the worst board i have ever build on aside soyo which for me stands as the worst ever motherboard of all time. Just to tell you how long ago this was i made them move over to the asus P5A socket 7 board for the amd cpus. Which at the time was probly the best motherboard out.

There were a couple more but its pretty late and my brain died. Also ill add i never let a companys tech support sway my opinion since i have yet to ever have any tech support for any computer problem ever be able to tell me anything i didnt already either know or do and it never fails at the end they tell me they dont know whats wrong. To me a companys tech support always sux i dont care how nice and helpfull they are unless they can actualy fix a problem i have over a phone.
 
Any motherboard with a VIA chipset - Booting the system with my iPod results in a slower than a 486 booting Windows 98 P.O.S.T.

Maxtor Hardrives from the last 3 years - They just dont last for more than 6 months, I have a 2.8GB Maxtor drive from 1998 that still is up and running.

Generic Ram - They are more likely to die quick.

ECS - Garbage motherboards period.
 
Avoid everything by 3D Connect. If you ever have trouble, they're warranty process could not be worse. I bought two 9200SE cards for 2D autocad stations. Both were bad out of the box. I actually threw the cards away in frustration after 3 months of constant emails and phone calls to no avail. About two months later, I flamed them on TG Forumz and sent them a copy at the same email address I had sent all of the communication. Less than an hour later I received an RMA. Lessons learned: 1. Never buy 3D Connect. 2. Manufacturers pay attention to posts on TG Forumz!
 
that has to be a joke right. floppies have been the mainstay of pc's since forever (at least to me). if one thing ain't going to break down in a pc i would have said the floppy as i have neever had one break doown on me or any other comp i have known. guess i am just lucky.
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I've never had a problem with a floppy drive, although at college we have HP computers and people that use floppy disks are CONSTANTLY losing their data. I think it's the drives.
 
Samsung makes greats DVD+/-RW burners....

NEC new monitors kick a$$, though..

~Ibrahim~

P.S. Rumours of NEC launching a gaming monitor
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Samsung makes some kickass monitors. I like pioneer full sized DVD burners, they seem tough and look great in black. I bought a couple of slot load drives (for a mATX system) and one had some issues. Besides spitting out my CD's they also have very cheap faceplates. They're very slow and loud for what they cost me. So I'm listing laptop CD/DVD drives here as well, particularly slot load ones. Awesome concept, poor performance and reliability.
 
interesting set of opinions...

Ive never had any problems with my maxtor hard drives. I got them because they were 2x faster then their seagate and WD counterparts.

back when everyone was bashing IBM's deskStar drives for running hot, mine ran flawlessly for around 5 years.


stuff ive had PROBLEMS with...
ATI 9600 vid card -- crashed my PC on startup. went back go TI4600, problem solved

XFX brand geforce cards. driver would not find card, 3 weeks back & forth with manufacturer, return card for RMA. went back to above TI4600

Antec 1080 case (front door would break off in shipment).

PowerColor video cards - drivers that came with card would not find the card.



Stuff I wish other people would stay away from:
USB keyboards.

Bootable RAID array and Windows XP.

Outlook express (world's greatest virus conduit).
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Raid ARRAY is sort of dumb yes. Raid-5 right? XP is good compared to other Windows OS's like Windows ME. Had more crashes on my P3 system than I care to remember. What's wrong with USB keyboards and mice? They rock! 🙂
 
I also want to list OEM computer MOTHERBOARDS here. I have a sock 478 Intel Board with AGP slot contacts, but with the slot itself missing. 5 cents for a piece of plastic and maybe another 5 cents for some asian to solder it onto the board doesn't seem like too much to ask for my system to come with. Of course, then they'd have had to actually include a half decent PSU with the system to power it instead of the bare minimum.

I should also make mentioned of certain HP All-In-Ones. I have a 2410 xi and it seems kickass...but there is an oil film under the scanner glass which is a common problem (researched) and it loves to recalibrate everytime I turn on my computer. Spent $350 at Sam's Club a few years ago. Tech support for HP blows and it seems they have short warranties.
 
has anyone not had a problem with......

ATI All-in-Wonder Series of any related products
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Great Question. I'm looking at TV tuner cards right now and could really use some help with which one to get. Seems like there's not as big of a market for them yet as what there could be....resulting in poorer quality cards. I'd love to see them combined with video cards.
 
dude seriously get a hauppauge add on card and not an AIW... speaking as someone with an AIW card.

for the following reasons... I have a AIW 9600Pro

I have had /have the following issues.

a. the software SUCKS.... most notablely the gemstar guide plus that comes w/ it.... freaking useless... mouse cursor disapears when viewing schedule making virtually impossible to schedule a record... Known issue since I got the card never has been fixed.

Additionally the MMC software freaking blows also... I am stuck one a many versions old MMC package.... because in their wisdom ATI moved the audio to digital from analog...resulting in sync problems for the 9600s if ran with new media center packages.


b. had to RMA the card cause the tuner just died for no apparent reason....annoying but to be fair ATI did process the RMA reasonably quickly.

c. Linux.....no tv for j00

d. if you want to upgrade your video card... kiss your TV tuner good by also.... if you think about it once you've got a good TV card it should serve for quite sometime but a Video card is something most people upgrade reasonable frequently.


In my case the tuner is not in my main rig so it is not that big a deal that it is only a 9600Pro at this point.
 
did anyone list e-machines? I'm not being bias... but any computer company who could cram a machine full of crap.. sell it... and not give you room to upgrade? (GATEWAY *cough* GATEWAY) should go out of business rapidly
 
Epson lost a class action lawsuit just about six months ago. It seems their printers were pretending to be out of ink so you would buy new carts, when in fact they still had ink. I think my portion of the award was the right to buy more Epson products at a small discount. Yeh, that's the ticket. Is that typical government thinking or what?
I am surprised no one mentioned those certain Fujitsu drives, of not really so many years past, that failed at a preposterously high rate. Even today I wouldn't buy a Fujitsu anything. I mean, don't they put this stuff through some tests before they start manufacturing? What would it take to hook up a few prototype hard drives to a computer?
Anybody else have a difficult time with M-Audio software drivers?
No trouble with usb keyboard or trackballs.
No touble with old Abit or ECS mbs.
No trouble with certain generic memory.
Immense trouble with every kind of tape backup we tried in our office. A lot of the time they quit making it or no longer supported it; Colorado, Sony. We don't use tape anymore,
 
My Fujitsu Lifebook C2111 laptop.

Heavy, slow, max 512 Ram.

The motherboard had to be replaced 2 times in the first 2 years because the AC connection would break off the mobo with any pressure at all.

Very poor battery life.

One of the hinges on the left side is partially cracked now and the screen will fall over if it's leaned too far back.

I think my next laptop will be a more major brand and about half the weight.
 
i stay away from anything with the words VALUE, VIA, VE, and if its under 50 bucks its prob not worth getting....


5700ve crap..
via chipset crap
value ram = crap...

and yamaha does not make anything good for cpu's....
 
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