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

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]madooo12[/nom]#10, it wasn't AMD it was ATi[/citation]

Hmmm. A little nit-picky, but OK... fixed.

 

[leaderWON]

wonk wonk @ #17.

 

[Onus]

I tried to use a Cyrix CPU. It sure was fast, but it sucked so much power it killed the VRMs on two motherboards within days. I'm not sure Cyrix deserves the fail for that; I think whoever made the mobo (long since forgotten) claiming Cyrix compatibility gets it.

 

[Scotty99]

While i was scrolling through the article i was hoping in my mind the FX cpu's would be the last one on the list, i gave a solid fist pump when i reached the end : )

 

[will_chellam]

I'm disappointed not to see the now infamous windows 95 plug-and-plat BSOD on the big announcement day..... worthy of a top-fail all by itself....

It did however pave the way for better things - a lot of people wont remember plugging in hardware and literally nothing happening - having to manually install drivers, edit autuexec.bat win.ini and config.sys and change physical dip-switches to set IRQ and DMA addresses...... ahhh, sad times.

 

[gm0n3y]

Arg, please don't remind me of the terrible Intel push pins. I hate those so much. They were so hard to get into many motherboards that I often ended up buying aftermarket coolers just to avoid using the stock one.

I also had a couple of those zip drives fail on me. They were awesome at the time when they actually worked though.

 

[will_chellam]

Oh yeah, my first self-built PC was a Cyrix 6x86 PR-133+ (what a POS processor) it did however have 32MB of RAM and a 16mb millenium G200 graphics / x2 12mb voodoo2 cards and a DXR2 decoder (3 loopthroughs at the back..) most people ran 4 or 8 Mb of RAM back then.....

 

[Guest]

Ah, the Zip drive, that takes me back. I had the old blue 100 meg external drive that plugged into a parallel port, and maybe two disks for it. (They were around 30-40 bucks each, IIRC.) It survived all the way through high school, then clicked itself to death when I went to college. I remember the class action settlement was particularly ironic: A coupon for 15 bucks off the purchase of another Iomega product. Gee, thanks.

 

[dontcrosthestreams]

what about dell laptops made in 2006-07. they had the mobile 9000 series nvidia cards that would overheat the computer into death. both dell, nvidia, and retailers worked together to cover up the problem. bestbuy even refused my receipt after the computer died 2 months after purchase.

 

[memadmax]

The IBM DeathStar was the one thing that pissed me off the most these past few years...

 

[biscuitasylum]

[citation][nom]face-plants[/nom]The drive wasn't a failure but as a mass-storage medium in it's time it had way too high of a failure rate. I used Zip Disks for archiving (100, 250, and 750) for years but had a few disks of each type fail on me. These were all relatively new since I would use them to backup data and only access them again to check what I had saved... and sometimes to add more files to them. As a backup medium, they were no good. Thank god that each one I had die was a backup copy of data I still had the original copies of. Any backup medium that you save files to, store it away someplace safe only to find the disk unreadable some time later is worthless. After having enough disks die unexplainably I found it more reliable to just put two or more hd's in each of my personal machines and leave one disconnected except for periodic system images.Maybe I just had bad luck or an unusually high amount of cosmic radiation finding it's way to my disks but I'd never trust a Zip Disk again.[/citation]

When i saw the Zip disk, it made sense... perfect sense. However... I have an Old Macintosh G3/333 beige system thats been upgraded to a G4/500 that I still keep around for nostalgia reasons. Its used specifically for music. Its packed with a huge library of it. Funny thing is... it has the internal zip drive that still works to this day. I have only had two disks malfunction since I bought the system at the end of 1998.

 

[Guest]

If you use XPMode you can run that printer regardless of it's 64bit driver support:
http://aaronls.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/no-windows-7-driver-for-your-printer-use-xp-mode/

 

[jasonmac731]

Shouldn't we include Lightscribe to this list. Great idea but who in the hell wants to wait 30 minutes to burn a label when I can write a label with a Sharpie in 3 seconds. I'll admit that it created some really nice monochrome graphics though.

 

[LauRoman]

[citation][nom]phamhlam[/nom]Where is Windows Vista?[/citation]
I honestly think that Windows XP SP1 (and i only mean that iteration of the service pack) was a far worse fail than Windows Vista.

 

[Khimera2000]

[citation][nom]jasonmac731[/nom]Shouldn't we include Lightscribe to this list. Great idea but who in the hell wants to wait 30 minutes to burn a label when I can write a label with a Sharpie in 3 seconds. I'll admit that it created some really nice monochrome graphics though.[/citation]

I did but the guy was grating my nerves... and I really wanted him to suffer. Don't remember what was on the disk, but it was fun to see him glued to a little green light for all that time : ))

 

[dark_lord69]

yeah...
Windows ME should be on the list!
I think that is worse than AMD's new FX CPU's.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

[citation][nom]Soma42[/nom]Why all the hate on Vista? It had it's issues, don't get me wrong, but it was an improvement over XP in a lot of ways. Windows 7 > Vista > XPDefinitely not face-palm worthy.[/citation]
vista was crap, in no way was it an improvement on XP. Thats why you see most businesses still using XP and very few, if any, stupid enough to use Vista.

 

[jdwii]

I was waiting to see Bulldozer. I would take anything with a grain of salt when Amd says it.

 

[A Bad Day]

I have an ancient desktop that has Pentium 4 Willamette, and trust me, it's slow as hell.

 

[Guest]

The driver issue is still apparent. I just for an HP Officejet Pro 8600 for my office and I had to update my Mac's to 10.6 for them to work only to find out that to further frustrate matters Windows Server 2008 R2 isn't exactly supported and unlike in the past where you could force drivers, my attempts have fallen flat. You'd think a business class printer would have business OS support. Guess I was wrong.

 

[Guest]

my favorite fails for the last 15 years is:

Ati drivers, in the era of the Rage 128 - I recall a time when It's hard to make working an ATI All-in-wonder 128 without it's original drivers from the installation cd. Each news drivers where a nightmare to remove and to bring back the card stable.

RDRAM : when I worked into a computer shop, when this sort of ram has appear, it's was write in the sky - Beware of this scam! We have sell some systems with RDRAM but the sdram remain very popular until the DDR appear on the market.

Pentium IV Prescott in it's first incarnation - Somewhat underperforming cpu for it's TDP and a very long 32 stage pipeline... So, I could say these cpu's was enough stable to be usable and enjoyable has a heater to replace my old Ciryx

Windows 95 version A with is 15 floppy of doom and basic pnp- because the second was better than 3.1 and the third one is even better.

Next cpu's and board was the ancestor of the AMD K6 but was very hard to get fast to run under Windows 95

Cyrix PRxxx series processor because these have virtualy no FPU vs Pentium cpu of the same time. But, I had one for two week in my pc and I loved the way it heated my house basement

IBM MCA proprietary bus - too proprietary to worth to buy but very interresting architecture for it's time vs the ISA and VLB

LS-120 is not famous as the Zip drive, but do you remerber the Syquest Ez drive?

 

[bryonhowley]

The FX CPU is very good and should not be on this list at all.

 

[GamingBob]

Windows ME would be at the top of my list for sure. It was terrible, just the absolute worst.

 

[pjmelect]

I also vote for slot based CPU's like the P3 I am glad they did away with them.

 

[matter37]

wow I have the Deathstar in my hands