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

[ChromeTusk]

... Besides, you're skipping NT and 2000 in there too. 2000 was a pretty good OS.

I agree with you that Win-NT and Win-2k were great, especially since they were deployed in business environments. Their stability finally came to consumers in Win-XP.

That would be incorrect. ME is part of the Win9x family. Its really Windows98se with added functions that some ended up being in XP. Nowhere near close to beta of XP. XP is derived from the NT family - its not an MS-DOS based OS, supports NTFS, etc. But NT didn't become a usable platform until Win2000. NT4 and older were nightmares, nothing more.

Vista being a beta of Win7... not really, but I can see how it could be viewed. Not much public testing, it offered little over XP. It did many things badly and computer operation was virtually the same as with XP. ... Also MCE was the OS to get for XP...

I do not disagree with the fact that Win-ME comes from the Win-9x family and that was part of its downfall. It just felt like Microsoft was attempting to bring NT/2000 features to the 9x family without completely changing the kernel. In any case, MS wanted to push/try something new, customers complained, problems were identified (and hopefully fixed), and MS released a better OS.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Windows_Family_Tree.svg - Retrieved from Wikipedia just as a visual.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

I'm trying to figure out why the IBM Deskstar hard disk drives are considered to be an epic failure. Were they just not popular, too expensive, or something else? I definitely remember building quite a few pc's with Deskstar hhd's for customers, friends, and relatives. I don't recall any problems. What am I missing?

 

[darkavenger123]

[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 totally agreed. I used VISTA since day 1, only in the begiining there were a few drivers issue, after that it was great, sure beats the crap out of XP. The main problem with VISTA was, the ecosystem at that time is still pretty much Win98 or XP dominant....which introduces lots of incompatibilities with VISTA.....for home users, not much problem, but for corporate, a lots of problems. For Win 7, the compatibility is higher, but still not 100%, but with 98 pretty much died out, and the Windows Server 2008, Exchange 2007 in place, it reduce a lot of the compatibility issues faced by VISTA as the ecosystem has moved foward and friendlier to Win 7.

 

[livebriand]

Yep, I've dealt with those damn Intel heatsink pushpins on my 1156 board. The last time I cleaned the thermal paste, I had to try about 20 times to get the heatsink on without bending one of the pushpins. UGHH...

 

[livebriand]

[citation][nom]bystander[/nom]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.[/citation]
Yep. I know a guy with an Athlon x2 machine running Vista. With the stock 1GB, it was horribly slow and next to unusable, even after an OS reinstall. I added 2GB, so 3GB total, and it was MUCH better.

 

[MrBurns]

I agree with you that Win-NT and Win-2k were great, especially since they were deployed in business environments. Their stability finally came to consumers in Win-XP.

I have used 98SE and XP on the same system in dual boot and 98SE was much more stable (it eperienced less BSODs than XP).
And in 98SE you could actually coninue working after a BSOD, which MS made impossible in all NT-based OSes.

On contemporary systems XP is more stable then it was on my old system, but this is not because of improvements of the OS itself imho, but because of the improvement in driver stability, mainly because of WHQL.

@vista: I used this with XP in dualboot on my current system, it had much more BSODs and other errors and the interface was much slower, even after reverting to classic style and all the DX9 games ran about 10% slower. I don't use it now anymore and I will reformat the Vista partition soon to install 7.

I don't have any experience on NT 4.0 and 2k, because I never used them.

PS: I know that there is a risk that you corrupt your data and damage even some of the hardware, when you continue after a BSOD, but the risk is small especially for hardware damages and data corruption can be corrected by restoring backups or sometimes by system restore, so i would find it better when the user can deside if he takes that risk. Actually I continued in 98SE after BSODs everytime when it was possible and i never had any data corruption or hardware damages because of this. I only had dat corruption when it was not possible to continue oand make a regular shutdown, so imho removing the possibility of continuing after a BSOD even increases the chance of data corruption (this is because every write to the disk is stopped when the system is halted for a BSOD in NT-bbased OSes).

I'm trying to figure out why the IBM Deskstar hard disk drives are considered to be an epic failure. Were they just not popular, too expensive, or something else? I definitely remember building quite a few pc's with Deskstar hhd's for customers, friends, and relatives. I don't recall any problems. What am I missing?

There was one particular deskstar model, which faled very frequently and this article doesn't have the DeskStar in general on the list, but this model (IBM Deskstar 75GXP).

 

[skit75]

People hated Vista because they tried to run it on XP era hardware. It was viewed as a RAM hog at a time DDR RAM was not so cheap to purchase. Systems running 512MB & 1GB perfectly fine in XP screeched to a stutter after an OS "upgrade". It is never the user's fault... didn't you know?

 

[blazorthon]

People hated Vista because they tried to run it on XP era hardware. It was viewed as a RAM hog at a time DDR RAM was not so cheap to purchase. Systems running 512MB & 1GB perfectly fine in XP screeched to a stutter after an OS "upgrade". It is never the user's fault... didn't you know?

When OEM builders make systems with XP-era hardware and sell it to unsuspecting users it's not the users fault. The serious driver problems are not the user's fault. The instability and many BSODs are not always the user's fault. The large CPU overhead was not the user's fault.

What are you trying to prove?

Besides, getting windows 7 on XP era hardware was much less of a problem so it's not because people tried to use an OS on the hardware they had (in fact, the only affordable hardware out at the time), the problem was an OS that was ridiculously bloated. Windows 8 is supposed to have even less bloat than Windows 7 so it should run even better on all hardware, including older hardware, that is if it has the drivers.

 

[MrBurns]

The sytsem I used Vista on wa not anXP-era system, it has a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, 4GB of RAM and 2 8800GT graphics cards (SLI). This is much faster than the system requirements for Vsta and than allmost all OEM systems that where sold at the end of 2006 (actually I bought the components of my system in 2008 and at the End of 2006 the Q6600 and the 8800 GT were not out yet, so you would have to buy a QX6700 for over 1000$ and a 8800 GTX for over 500$ to get that amount of performance, I think one 8800 GTX would have been enough because SLI doesn't work on Aero), but the GUI was still slow even in classic mode.

And also 7 shows that it can be done better, even with the fancy Aero GUI enabled, my Laptop has a lower porforming hardware then my desktop, but still 7 is much fatser there then Vista was on my main system, even when I have Aero enabled on 7, but disabled on Vista. I even don't notice a difference between 7 on Aero and XP.

Imho Vista was a premature release although it took MS like 5 years in making. But I thing the main reason for the long development of Longhorn/Vista was that they tried a lot of stuff which was omitted later, like WinFS.

Also Vista is a memory hog, when you installed it on a sysem with 512MB, which is the minimum, it would even use morre than that even if you have nothing else running except Vista and the services, that run on default. Even with 1GB, which is the recommended minimum, it would still be using allmost all of the physical memory right after the boot, so if you start any application, which is a little more complex then minesweeper, you would get a considerable amount of swapping.

 

[giorgi159]

[citation][nom]phamhlam[/nom]Where is Windows Vista?[/citation]

indeed, where is Windows Vista? it should be the first in this list

 

[Guest]

Ouch I also have Konica Minolta 1350W! I might have to jump back to Ubuntu when the time comes.

 

[najirion]

So true with the boxed intel heatsinks! It's really haaaaaaaaaaaaard to get them right in the board.
Even though my case allows me to access the backplate easily and has enough room to fit in the heatsink while upright, it just ain't happening for these heatsinks! I would need to lay the whole case flat on the ground so that I can use both hands in fastening those pesky pushpins.. Well, its not really easy to lay a fulltower case flat on the floor full of hardware...

 

[blazorthon]

Considering how poor of a design the push pin heat sinks are, why are they still common? Why not just drop the heat sink and the price of the CPUs by $5 to cover the loss of the heat sink or use a better heat sink installation method?

 

[Chad Boga]

Nice article Don/Cleeve.

It was especially gratifying to see you handling the lunatics at AMDZone too. LOL!!!!

 

[ochentay4]

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

The most disturbing thing of this article is Intel Heatsink, its the worst solution *ever* and it is still on the market! I have sold a lot of aftermarket coolers to Inter customers that complain about the cooler detaching from the motherboard, or broken legs. AMD coolers all the way. Intel shuld learn from AMD on some things (AMD too...).

 

[ochentay4]

Intel Heat Sink Pushpins (2004-Present) - That's my #1 right there - HORRIBLE DESIGN!!!

I think EVERYONE hates them. Intel should change the cooler system now. They are absolutely crap. Thw worst cooling solution *ever*.

 

[cuthbert]

I have to say that I don't understand the inclusion of the Logitech keyboard. I would figure that anyone that went to the trouble of actually buying that doesn't need to have any printing on the keys at all. The keys have been in the exact same place since 1874. It isn't like you have to guess where something is, requiring you to look at what is printed on the key in the first place.

 

[mickyd1234]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]It may improve the experience of some games/movies/etc, but I'm not sure about it. I'm not sure if it would distract to much or if I'd really want to smell anything in some games. It's an odd concept that I'd try out in a heart beat and it most certainly could add a whole new level of realism, but I'm not sure how it would work out.We should also look into the circumstances surrounding it's failures. Why has it failed several times? Can it even be done? If it's a realistic goal, does it simply need more advanced technology than we have now?This raises so many questions, I guess it's time to go to Google and work my way from there.[/citation]
personally I'd really like this to be possible. I only base this on a very old text based adventure I played back in the mid 80's (adult title, something about Mars being run by women warriors - yes I was pre-pubesent at the time :-0) that came with a scratch-n-sniff card that you were prompted to use at certain points. NO, not the smells you might think but basic odors like a stale pizza in a room. It actually did add to the game for me so an electronic version would be cool, I just think the technology is still so far away...

 

[clonazepam]

Hope this doesnt end up a double post =

Would the epson perfection scanner work using epson's twain pro driver?

Since the majority of scanners' internals are all the same, and just scaled differently, or more/less ports, or fancy buttons on the front, the "high end" scanner drivers usually work with the low-end. It's been so long, I'd be interested in knowing if a 64-bit driver for a scanner like the expression 10000 series would work on that 1250... like this one Here.

 

[blazorthon]

Hope this doesnt end up a double post =

Would the epson perfection scanner work using epson's twain pro driver?

You would have a better chance of an answer if you posted that question on the forums instead of on a news article.

 

[clonazepam]

The question is to the author of this article who stated his epson perfection scanner won't work in Win 7... its at the very beginning of the pictorial.

Anyway, I might toss in a .5 to .75 epic fail to OEMs who shipped PCs with Win95 and USB ports.

 

[clonazepam]

Since Epson is mentioned, I'd replace the scanner fail with their most epic fail ever. I used to be on a team of a dozen or so folks supporting their pro graphics line of products at the Long Beach HQ, years ago.

The Epson PhotoPC 800 2MP USB Camera. This thing was a nightmare. It came with NiMH batteries. Nobody could get more than 20-30 seconds of use on a full charge. They often told folks to charge the battery, unplug and replug til it says full again, and repeat that 2 more times before using. Still never worked. A girlfriend had previously bought one on release so I had 1st hand experience. A brand new set of lithium non-rechargeable batteries were your best bet and you'd consider yourself extremely lucky to get 10 photos out of the thing before it died. Epson epic-failed this implementation of a rear LCD screen and its power management was atrocious on a scale that trumps everything before or since.

 

[belardo]

[citation][nom]livebriand[/nom]Yep. I know a guy with an Athlon x2 machine running Vista. With the stock 1GB, it was horribly slow and next to unusable, even after an OS reinstall. I added 2GB, so 3GB total, and it was MUCH better.[/citation] So with 3GB, the computer performed like Windows7 with 1GB of RAM.

[citation][nom]skit75[/nom]People hated Vista because they tried to run it on XP era hardware. It is never the user's fault... didn't you know?[/citation] As someone posted, system builders sold Vista boxes that couldn't handle the bloated mess of Vista. Vista is forever broken, who cares - its a joke.
I'd still take a 1GB Win7 or XP system over a 4GB vista system any day. Especially when vista first came out, it OFFERED nothing over XP in functionality or security (since most users shut off OCP).

@Mrburns about Vista on good hardware and memory. Agreed 100%. for fun, I installed Win7beta on a number of OLD computers for fun... it ran on older and slower hardware better than vista on a spanking new machine. For a year, I ran Win7 with 1GB on my notebook with a bottom end Core2 CPU... ran pretty good.

 

[Guest]

xD where vista, really

 

[nebun]

that's why every accessory out there comes with it's own drivers or if not you can download them from the manufacturer's website.....i am glad that Microsoft decided to get rid of almost all the drivers.....we don't use the anyways.....now let's get rid of all the useless fonts