How's your luck with technology?

unplanned bacon

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Jan 11, 2014
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I seem to have either great luck or none. I either get something perfect first time or need multiple replacements to get a working product. Then either it lives forever (some of these products that have a bad reputation for reliability) whereas others have a case of anything that can go wrong will go wrong (and these, if I'm not mistaken are the ones that have a good reputation with others).

Annoyingly, I think he ones that go bad are the ones I try and take extra care of. Things like stuck pixels/other issues from seemingly harmless incidents, not working at all, not charging out the box, all manner of rare issues that no one else suffers. I either get or a near perfect experience.

 

Wolfshadw

Titan
Moderator
It's been a few years since I've done any upgrades, but back then, I built half a dozen systems over the course of a couple years. Thinking back on it, I've had my fair share of hardware failures. I started this list with just three failures, but then I remembered the others.

1) An ASRock 939Dual-SATAII motherboard died after several years of reliable service. ($80)
2) Monitor developed a vertical purple line two-thirds to the right of my screen. Sent in for repairs. Lasted another 18 months before finally dying. ($269)
3) Western Digital Hard drive died after less than six months. ($65)
4) CPU cooler failed around five months in (not overclocking). ($29)
5) A 27" monitor failed after three years of normal use. ($300)
6) TV Tuner card failed after seven years of use (unfortunate if not unexpected). ($300)

Of the $1000's of dollars spent on computer equipment over the years, I can safely say less than 2% has failed within the warranty period.

-Wolf sends
 
I'll go back just to my c2d rig but that's still working. When I first bought that, the monitor had a vertical row of pink pixels. $370 monitor but I won't be adding that to the failure amount since it was free rma. A few years later, gpu upgrade had issues crashing when under load randomly but I had bought that $40 used on amazon. Got a used monitor too but was locally and needed new caps. I spent like $2 on caps and that was mostly just shipping. New pc had no issues except for going through mice that seem to only last 2 years before multi clicking (around $100 in total for all the mice). A used monitor $140 that had a dead pixel and a few years later the led backlight would have sections that didn't work. A new monitor a few years ago and got 2 dead pixels side by side after I think 2 months. I won't add that price because it's still usable.

Less than $300 total over a more than 10 year span. That's a small percentage of issues and mostly monitor related. Most issues were from used amazon stuff but anything used locally had no issues besides that one monitor needing new caps. It's better when you can confirm used stuff condition before buying. That is just 2 things used off amazon but 100% issue rate (not counting amazon warehouse deals which is "like new" but actually new). As for new, other than the first monitor rma, the others were after warranty for the mice or dead pixels that didn't qualify.