In Pictures: 16 Of The PC Industry's Most Epic Failures

[Guest]

I am really surprised to see the entry about the IDE-SATA adapters; I have been using one with the Gigabyte GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 to connect my LG GCC-4320B flawlessly from the first moment I installed Windows 7 for the first time via DVD and ever since it has worked perfectly, even when accessed over the Ethernet network. Did not even have to configure anything. I have the Vantec CB-IS100, maybe try that people?

 

[pharoahhalfdead]

The only thang I didn't like about Vista was the strain it put on the system, especially the memory. Memory HOG, at least for the available hardware at the time. After tweaking, and turning off all the bells and whistles, my system ran pretty smooth. Had Microsoft been honest about the "recommended sys req" I think it would have been better received.

 

[bystander]

[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]I never got why Vista was considered so terrible. Yeah, user account control was irritating, but if you disable it you're getting 99% of the Windows 7 experience. I never jumped on the 'I hate Vista!' bandwagon. I actually had it on my server until very recently.[/citation]

I never disliked it either, but I think the main reason it was so disliked was that it was installed on systems with too little ram for it to operate. It just was more of a resource hog than the average and below average systems could comfortably run.

 

[triny]

It goes to show you that what looks good or sounds good may not be the cat's meow after all

 

[daggs]

totally agree on the intel hsf pins!

totally don't agree about the new AMD FX, the cpu only came out, it has a different architecture (server oriented, not desktop) and the compilers aren't optimized yet.
one should give it some months until proper support will be available, then check it again.

 

[Guest]

Wauw, I never thought my keyboard would get on the list. Even after 6 years of use, not a single chip of paint has come off.

 

[mpotran]

I would add Seagate's line of Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives which failed massively. Not to mention Seagate didn't offer free data recovery.

 

[Dacatak]

Is it just me or does pressing read more make you read less and vice versa?

 

[iamtheking123]

Why are people trying to argue Vista was good? It was a massive POS that was basically "take XP, throw some sparkle on it, and make everything else worse". I dropped it like a hot potato when it would boot to the desktop and then sit for 60 seconds before it would finish loading. MS called it a feature...which it would be if you could actually *do* anything while it was sitting there idling. Plus I found myself spending way too much time trying to get it to behave sensibly (like XP), so I said *** it and went back to XP. Still on XP today since 7's UI blows after MS started cheating off of Apple's "design for retards" method.

 

[Badelhas]

[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]I never got why Vista was considered so terrible. Yeah, user account control was irritating, but if you disable it you're getting 99% of the Windows 7 experience. I never jumped on the 'I hate Vista!' bandwagon. I actually had it on my server until very recently.
Windows ME... now there I agree. I came this close to adding it to the list, I think I even wrote up a draft. the problem is, It's been so long and I used it so little before giving up on it and going back to Win 98 SE back in the day, i couldn't speak about what was wrong with it with real credibility. So I figured I'd best leave it out.But yeah, ME sucked.[/citation]

I dont agree with you. Vista was not only irritating...("Are you absolutly sure you want to delete that file? Isnt it better if you call your lawyer and ask for his permission? Do you swear?"), but it was much slower in every other aspect.

Cheers

 

[extremepcs]

+1 for the Intel heatsink design. What a joke!

 

[rpgplayer]

[citation][nom]face-plants[/nom]True that...how about Millennium Edition also.[/citation]

I rushed out and bought ME at release, after running it for a week, I quickly went back to win2k.

 

[thehelix]

Tom's really needs to lose the slideshow format with the show more/click to forward... It is getting irritating and makes reading otherwise interesting articles a hassle...

 

[Onus]

I must be one of the fortunate few for whom Windows ME worked without issues; in fact installing it over a broken Win98 fixed things nicely for me. Anyway...

I absolutely agree about the driver abandonment. HP's new "Universal Driver" for Windows 7 is a bad joke, either not working from the getgo or breaking repeatedly after short intervals. HP has forgotten that they are, first and foremost, a printer company. This one's going to hurt, bad.

 

[DSpider]

Bulldozer, Piledriver...

Pile of bull?


What an unfortunate name. Almost like a self fulfilling prophecy.

 

[alidan]

i have a few things to say.

first, the biggest failure in my eyes is putting a pcie slot right below the pcie2x16 slot, if you have a gpu, than you likely have a 2 slot card, and on many budget motherboards, that slot is the only pcie slot...

second, i dont think that the fx deserves to be there, as its not a 100% fail, people expected to much and got disappointed, and i can admit im one who expected to much, but it shows its compeditive in many benchmarks, and when its not being forced into single core applications...

third, no dvd rewinder? its not pc tech but its real tech.

forth, and this is just me... but i would pay 100$ for a dedicated physix pcie card. i dont want physx to run off a gpu, and im not putting 2 gpus in my computer for it, and i don't want to be pigeonholed into nvidia for my gpu. till opencl comes out swinging, and even than, i would rather have a dedicated card for that crap.

 

[dickcheney]

[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]I never got why Vista was considered so terrible. Yeah, user account control was irritating, but if you disable it you're getting 99% of the Windows 7 experience. I never jumped on the 'I hate Vista!' bandwagon. I actually had it on my server until very recently.Windows ME... now there I agree. I came this close to adding it to the list, I think I even wrote up a draft. the problem is, It's been so long and I used it so little before giving up on it and going back to Win 98 SE back in the day, i couldn't speak about what was wrong with it with real credibility. So I figured I'd best leave it out.But yeah, ME sucked.[/citation]

People who believe that Vista was so bad are just ignorant or new to the whole computer thingy. Who didnt just turn off UAC? Windows ME on the other hand was an utter failure, it got me to revert to the trustworthy 98 SE.

Id like to add the Maxtor 40GB IDE drive to that list.

 

[chesteracorgi]

Windows Vista, Windows 2000, Microsoft's handling od OS/2, AOL, Apples proprietary hardware & software, IBM's miscalculations of the PC market, IBM's abandonment of OS/2, NeXT computers, and that KLUDGE of all KLUDGES Windows 3.1 and its POS successor Win 95 all come to mind when talking of epic fails.

 

[brendonmc]

Haha..yes have to agree that the XT2900 should be on this list. I wanted so much to love this card, but it was just frustration most of the time. The 512 bit ring bus memory interface was the reason for the 2900 being a power sucking freakshow but coupled with an underperforming GPU, it just didn't make sense.
Surprisingly, in certain synthetic benchmarks it was a performance winner, especially in crossfire. Unfortunately this didn't translate to real-world performance. The 3800 series was really no faster but didn't suck as much power. It took until the mighty 4800's came along to make up for this blunder.

 

[msgun98]

Surprised NVIDIA's mobile 8600GT wasn't on this list. That dang card was such a ticking time bomb that NVIDIA had to give people new laptops from a class action lawsuit. Too bad they only honored the class action for Dell, HP and Apple (I'll miss you, my old Compal).

 

[LORD_ORION]

Rage 128 should have been on this list

 

[ubercake]

[citation][nom]gdsmithtx[/nom]For years and years I've heard thousands kvetching about the horrors of Vista, like it had killed their pets, stolen their money and defiled their sisters. Maybe we're the only ones, but several of my friends and I had very few problems with Vista. My 9 y/o son's gaming PC is still running a four year old installation of Vista, and it performs nearly flawlessly.[/citation]
The 32-bit version may have been OK. The 64-bit? Vendor driver support lagged big time for the 64-bit version. It sucked.

On the other hand, putting a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit processor seems counterproductive (ie I have 12GB of RAM in my system but only 4GB are usable).

 

[hardcore_gamer]

Look at the page name "583-pc-fail-fx-itanium.html"...lol

 

[acasel]

Save the best for last = AMD Bulldozer. hehe

 

[hardcore_gamer]

"The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra that replaced it was better, but still couldn't compete against AMD's best effort when it came to advanced pixel shader operations. "

It was ATI at that time, not AMD.