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

[velocityg4]

This article missed the biggest failure ever the Xerox Alto/Star OS. Xerox could have ruled the home and business computer market. Instead they let MS and Apple go in and swipe the concept of the GUI from them thinking it was a trivial market.

They made a minor attempt with the Star but instead of building reasonably priced standalone machines they instead designed their system to require an obscenely expensive server computer then other expensive high end workstations.

The full networking and usability feature set of the Alto in the 70's was beyond anything available from either Apple or MS until the mid 90's. I don't think either company caught up until at least Windows 95 and Mac OS 8. Both of which required far more powerful computers to run than the Alto.

 

[Guest]

This list is so terribly short sighted.. focussing mainly on things from the past 5-10 years. Im quite disappointed, it was anti-climatic.

I think the bulk of IT related product failures must have been in the 1980 - 1999 era and basically nothing from there got a mention.

Without spending much time to think about it, I would consider the following

No graphics card in that list failed as absolutely as the 3DFX voodoo 3/4/5

What about the Cyrix 586 and 686 CPUs?

Matrox Mystique?

The original implementation of the intel MMX instruction set and the associated overhyping and overenthusiastic claims of performance increase

blah blah.



Next time please look into the topic a bit more thoroughly? Or rename it to "stuff that has annoyed me the past few years"

 

[fb39ca4]

Where is HD-DVD?

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]fb39ca4[/nom]Where is HD-DVD?[/citation]

There was nothing wrong with HD-DVD. It couldn't coexist with Blu-Ray so one of the two had to go, Blu-Ray was a little better and was marketed much better so it was cheaper.

 

[A Bad Day]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]There was nothing wrong with HD-DVD. It couldn't coexist with Blu-Ray so one of the two had to go, Blu-Ray was a little better and was marketed much better so it was cheaper.[/citation]
Yup, Sony killed HD-DVD when they added Blu-Ray with their PS3, and it didn't help the fact that they kept the PS3 cheap by making games more expensive.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]A Bad Day[/nom]Yup, Sony killed HD-DVD when they added Blu-Ray with their PS3, and it didn't help the fact that they kept the PS3 cheap by making games more expensive.[/citation]

Couldn't agree more. The PS3 was even cheaper than some Blu-Ray players of the time, killer deal until you saw the game prices. I can't complain much about that though, the games are generally good enough for their price and were good enough to not need as many games as with previous game consoles.

 

[Johnpombrio]

The main reason why Rambus failed was that it was released before the technology was ready. I was one of the first people to see an Intel/Rambus prototype when working for HP Test and Measurement. All the techies were stunned by the tiny eye of data read availability of the Rambus memory. It was touchy as hell and needed TLC in designs to make the memory work as advertised, hence the cost and latency issues. If they had waited another couple of years, it could have been what everyone would be using today...

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]Johnpombrio[/nom]The main reason why Rambus failed was that it was released before the technology was ready. I was one of the first people to see an Intel/Rambus prototype when working for HP Test and Measurement. All the techies were stunned by the tiny eye of data read availability of the Rambus memory. It was touchy as hell and needed TLC in designs to make the memory work as advertised, hence the cost and latency issues. If they had waited another couple of years, it could have been what everyone would be using today...[/citation]

Rambus has fixed latency problems in their latest RAM architectures, XDR and XDR2, but they haven't fixed the prices, easily even worse than any performance problem was. The only serious use of Rambu's memory I recall still going on is the 256MB XDR system memory in all Playstation 3s, I don't think Rambus is really doing anything to make money except taking legal payments from suing other companies.

 

[Johnpombrio]

I started with Vista beta back in the day. There were two main issues that were pretty severe when it came out.
Vista had really, really bad drivers for it, extraordinarily bad. NVidia graphics drivers were to blame for a majority of all the bad press that Vista got as the drivers made a bunch of things not work or run at a crawl. The other drivers issue was the lack of them. I had a brand new printer from the number one printer company (HP) and..no driver for almost 9 months.
The other major problem was file transfers. They usually went fine but I can still remember a transfer rate in the kb/sec range between two Vista machines on a 100 Mbps LAN setup. Really? kilobits per second on a simple file transfer?
Within a year, all of these issues went completely gone and Vista was more than fine. but for a while there, it was hairy and the news spread fast...

 

[notsleep]

don't forget to add nvidia's steaming fermi and intel sandy bridge sata bug...

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]notsleep[/nom]don't forget to add nvidia's steaming fermi and intel sandy bridge sata bug...[/citation]
Steaming? Do you mean streaming, as in stream processing? Cause that went pretty well for Nvidia and Fermi is also very good, not a fail whatsoever. Also, the SATA bug wasn't that bad. Sure, it sucked, but if your motherboard had any other SATA connectors you were fine. If you didn't then the problem is fixed with a $10 SATA PCIe expansion card.

 

[ArgleBargle]

Where is the nForce 750-790 motherboards and the video corruption bug which, when trying to play a youtube video or virtually any other video not under openGL, it would hard-crash your system, and nVidia refused to acknowledge or fix this for *years?* I made the huge mistake of buying one, and finally purchased an X58-chipset motherboard.

 

[ArgleBargle]

Oh, yes, and I was also sold an IBM Deskstar (not the 75GXP model) by my favourite local computer store. Within a few months, it crapped out completely. Should have learned my lesson after having an IBM 486 desktop that required *expensive* IBM RAM to expand past the 4 Mb mark. NEVER EVER buy anything IBM is my new motto.

 

[ArgleBargle]

[citation][nom]DrChips[/nom]"No graphics card in that list failed as absolutely as the 3DFX voodoo 3/4/5 "[/citation]
I have a Voodoo 3 2000 from years ago which still works perfectly. I love that card.

 

[JonnyDough]

The whole idea behind "iSmell" is that the sense of smell is the most directly tied to the brain, memorable, and accurate sense that we humans have. If someone were to spray a certain fragrance every time an ad was shown on your screen, you would remember it more often than if a jingle played every time.

 

[JonnyDough]

I have also used IDE to SATA converters without problem...

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]JonnyDough[/nom]The whole idea behind "iSmell" is that the sense of smell is the most directly tied to the brain, memorable, and accurate sense that we humans have. If someone were to spray a certain fragrance every time an ad was shown on your screen, you would remember it more often than if a jingle played every time.[/citation]

Doesn't mean that after several failures it will ever work, or at least ever work anytime soon.

 

[JonnyDough]

I have been using a blue backlit G15 Gaming Keyboard for years without problem. They must have changed the quality of their keys at some point. I also own the G15 Keyboard with the orange lights and the non-flip LCD.

 

[JonnyDough]

Does everyone forget Vistas driver issues? Maybe it was the hardware vendors fault, and not Microsoft, but if you can't run the OS on your hardware then it's still a fail.

 

[JonnyDough]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]Doesn't mean that after several failures it will ever work, or at least ever work anytime soon.[/citation]

Well, the whole audio/visual experience would certainly come a bit more alive. The Kalamazoo Air Zoo has a theater (so does Disneyland) that blows wind in your face, lets you smell the sea air, and shakes your seat. It is my belief that we don't fully realize all we're actually missing in the realm of entertainment.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]JonnyDough[/nom]Well, the whole audio/visual experience would certainly come a bit more alive. The Kalamazoo Air Zoo has a theater (so does Disneyland) that blows wind in your face, lets you smell the sea air, and shakes your seat. It is my belief that we don't fully realize all we're actually missing in the realm of entertainment.[/citation]

Maybe, but what would dictate what smells are coming out? If I'm in a FPS game, would having olfactory stimulus make it any better? I admit that sometimes such a device providing such an experience may be better than not having it, but I don't think it would be a huge success no matter how well implemented it is.

 

[belardo]

[citation][nom]hasten[/nom]Think he was talking about Bulldozer... Not sure if you are being sarcastic. Either way Blu-Ray is essential is you have the right hardware. ~~ As far as I'm concerned Blu-Ray is essential and nothing close to a failure.[/citation]
I think that poster was confused, but agree with you. But as most people don't care about image and sound quality - just as long as ITS big on a thin screen, streamed content at 720p and low-bit rate is good enough. A top quality movie on a BluRay disc may suck up 25~35GB of space alone. Not going to get that from netflicks.

@jtt283: About Cyrix chips and how it blew out your board. If you had your voltage set wrong, that would do it... and of course a low-quality board will fail too. A few years back, lower-end AMD boards would fail is used with a 135watt AMD CPU, even thou the BIOS supported the chip - many boards would die.

@dickcheney (Arent you dead yet?) - the store has a 15 day return policy, its up to him - not me how he handles it. I haven't seen him for a while and I showed him that the i5-2400 kicked the FX8150 in the balls... so how was his FX-6 (3core) CPU supposed to compare? For the $50 difference, its worth it to him.

 

[belardo]

ZIP - drive, I still have an internal IDE drive version. I have about 8~10 disks in a box somewhere, I have an urge to find them and copy whats on them if they still work and then recycle the junk. (I'm house cleaning my OLD tech anyway... but the C=8bit/Amigas stay)

[citation][nom]bryonhowley[/nom]The FX CPU is very good and should not be on this list at all.[/citation]
I generally prefer AMD over intel... but I buy what works so *I* do own some intel stuff (notebook / desktop) I was planning on replacing my 3+ year old Core2Quad this spring with Bulldozer. I was disappointed. A "NEW CHIP" is supposed to be better in every way over the previous tech. BD is a FAILURE because it not constantly better. Its the AMD version of Netburst (Pentium 4). There is something severely wrong when Company A's "8 core" 3.6Ghz $270 CPU is slower than Company I's $150 3.1Ghz 4 core CPU. That is double the cost for a fake 8-core CPU... and its performance shows.
So what if it can be OC to 4.x Ghz on AIR? Its already 125+watts out of the box. The OC makes it on par with a normal I5 CPU.

Since Intel is coming out with a new CPU in the coming months, that will be my upgrade.

[citation][nom]GamingBob[/nom]Windows ME would be at the top of my list for sure. It was terrible, just the absolute worst.[/citation]
Yeah, I had it on my PC for about a week. It was pure crap... so many problems. I went back to Win98se and stayed until 2004, then I went to XP.... until Win7 Beta.

 

[belardo]

[citation][nom]teodoreh[/nom]How about 840 chipset that revived the VIA P3 market share? How about Motorola and IBM failing to evolve PPC on a competitive level to x86?[/citation]
You are thinking of the 820 Chipset... which was a modded 840 with the MTH for SD-RAM, that cost intel millions in recall. The 815 came out with proper SD-RAM support and was a GREAT chipset, one of the best intel has ever made.

[citation][nom]mhumgood[/nom]Intel Pentium D should be on this list when it came out it's 3Ghz desktop chip was getting torn apart by Amd 1.6Ghz laptop Cpu[/citation]
The entire P4/Netburst design was flawed and sucked donkey balls compared to AMD. But its not a failure because it out-sold AMD easily due to intel's name brand and anti-marketing practices.
It took years, but AMD was getting to the point in which MOST PC choices were AMD, not Intel as tech people told their novice friends to NOT buy a P4 system. Then Core2 came out and kicked AMD until the balls came out of their ears. The Pentium-D CPUs were good, stable chips... nothing more.

[citation][nom]jimmysmitty and jerryc[/nom]Vista was not that bad. It was more the OEMs putting it with pretty crappy hardware. Millenium was horrible.But I think the article should be PC Industries 16 most epic hardware fails, since it seems this is mainly based on just hardware.[/citation]
yes, Vista *IS* that bad. So bad, that MS was force to sell WinXP until Win7 came about.

I'm not repeating what OTHERS are saying about it, I'm talking about personal experience. Long boot times and shut-downs. Won't wake up, won't shut down. It offered nothing that XP couldn't do (No DX 10 games at that time). Unpacking a 40mb driver reported by Vista to take 12mins.... I promptly murdered Vista, installed XP which was just bought to replace it (The 40mb audio driver was for XP, I wanted it unpacked and ready to go) - XP unpacked that same file in seconds.
Yeah the desktop only had 1GB of RAM on it, as it was for a grandma who only played card games, did a little email and maybe write a letter. I got nothing but complaints from her from Vista problems. Stuck on XP and never heard a peep.

I ran Win7 on my 1GB Thinkpad with the intel E2160 CPU (bottom end core2) - and it ran fine. I eventually added another GB for free. Vista systems needed 4~8GB to run decently. Meanwhile, Win7 runs pretty good on older/slower systems in ways Vista cannot ever do.

(At this moment, I just did a fresh install of Win7 onto a Vista Desktop with an E21080/2GB. PC runs better than new).

@A Bad Day :

Plus, Window Vista was a lot better now, if you have SP2 and Platform Upgrade installed.

er... sure, if you have the CPU and memory to feed it. Vista will never ever be fixed. Its dead, its crap. Win7 quickly out-sold it and has a much bigger market share that vista never touched. Stick the lastest patched up version of Vista onto a 1GB / 3-4 year old system (Vista era) and compare it to Windows7 with no SP... Guess which one will win? (Hint, the OS with a Number in its name)

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]belardo[/nom]ZIP - drive, I still have an internal IDE drive version. I have about 8~10 disks in a box somewhere, I have an urge to find them and copy whats on them if they still work and then recycle the junk. (I'm house cleaning my OLD tech anyway... but the C=8bit/Amigas stay)I generally prefer AMD over intel... but I buy what works so *I* do own some intel stuff (notebook / desktop) I was planning on replacing my 3+ year old Core2Quad this spring with Bulldozer. I was disappointed. A "NEW CHIP" is supposed to be better in every way over the previous tech. BD is a FAILURE because it not constantly better. Its the AMD version of Netburst (Pentium 4). There is something severely wrong when Company A's "8 core" 3.6Ghz $270 CPU is slower than Company I's $150 3.1Ghz 4 core CPU. That is double the cost for a fake 8-core CPU... and its performance shows.So what if it can be OC to 4.x Ghz on AIR? Its already 125+watts out of the box. The OC makes it on par with a normal I5 CPU.Since Intel is coming out with a new CPU in the coming months, that will be my upgrade.Yeah, I had it on my PC for about a week. It was pure crap... so many problems. I went back to Win98se and stayed until 2004, then I went to XP.... until Win7 Beta.[/citation]

Bulldozer is a failure, but it is NOT a "fake" eight core CPU. It has 8 cores and 8 FPUs. It shares some hardware normally replicated for each core, such as the decoders, between two cores within each module, but there are 8 cores. The modular approach taken by AMD may have worked much better if, as you say, Bulldozer wasn't AMD's take on the Netburst concept of horrible IPC, moderate clock rates.

AMD's high latency caches really don't help the problem either.

There are some situations where the eight core FX's will beat everything besides the i7s. The FX-8120 and FX-8150 will beat all i5's in highly threaded integer workloads.