WORST COMPUTER YOU'VE EVER OWNED/HAD TO USE

[Leslieann]

I think part of the problem wasn't just DDR2, it was bad chipset options.  I think you could get some P35/P45 boards with DDR3 slots, but I think some of the chipsets had weird limits like "8Gb DDR2, 4Gb DDR3 only".  I learned that one the hard way dealing with a stupid G41-based machine.

The best chipset was the P45 and P55, but they were only Sata2 and DDR2. A few could go to 16gigs of ram, but bend over if you want it. Just as the larger ram sticks were starting to ramp up production was right when the flood happened and DDR2 was discontinued for the most part, so they aren't that common. In fact Newegg has no DDR2, but has DDR1 and DDR3.

The newer G41's could do DDR3, but the chipset is actually a downgrade and just an upgrade path to DDR3, so you get weird memory limits (some are even 10/100 and not gigabit). I honestly think it's just an old, juiced up 945 chipset, which while not fantastic has been Intel's workhorse for a while. At any rate, the G4's not meant to really replace the older chipsets, it's meant as a replacement motherboard to keep you going until you can upgrade. This is especially true for boards supporting multiple ram types.

[IPT]

my bro's still using a Q6600 with Gigabyte P35-DS3R lol

[microsoft windows]

This is a canon computer that came in the other day at our shop

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4mb ram

400 MB hdd

50 mhz processor

the comp had a BS with it too! I tried buying it off her for 60$ LOL but she liked it too much apparently

Are those ISA ports I see? Looks like we're going back to the good ol' days!

[roaduck]

Tell us about the worst computer you owned or had to use on a regular basis!

I'd say the worst ones I had to work with would have been the Apple Emac's after they started getting old. They were slower than dirt with their dinky G4 processors running Mac OS X 10.5 on 1GB of ram. And half of 'em had really bad screen burn too from the MAC OS 9.2 days (OS9 didn't have screen savers for the login screen). And then the keyboards....they came with the worst feeling rubber dome keyboards imagineable.

The first modern PC I had in 1999 was called a Patriot which had an Intel  667Mhz chip, 256KB RAM memory a 10 GB HDD and 13 inch monitor...God it was terrible...Windows 98SE and it was ugly, slow and as about as reliable as a chocolate fireguard.

It regularly sparked and/or caught fire or something died on it and I had to reinstall Win 98 twelve times in one day because of catastrophic crashes.

It cost £599 and was a total dog.It was much worse than the TIME machine...that was a ferrari compared to my effort.

[Kayla]

Anything by Lenovo

[tp4tissue]

Imacs..   any Imac... Awful... just awful....

[StylinGreymon]

Any computer that isn't mine, really.

[blackbox]

Anything by Lenovo

Why?

My acer eee netbook and my hp g5000 was pretty bad. The HP had few connectors and had bad thermal design.

[Prelim]

well, anything from asus is a bad pc

[blackbox]

 

well, anything from asus is a bad pc

Can you explain your joke?

[tp4tissue]

well, anything from asus is a bad pc

Can you explain your joke?

asus laptops are notoriously warm running...

[Computer-Lab in Basement]

well, anything from asus is a bad pc

Can you explain your joke?

asus laptops are notoriously warm running...

TBH I've had worse experiences with HP laptops. Almost every single one with AMD CPUs overheats and fries the motherboard after like 2 years. Personally dealt with 5 such cases of this, and will never buy an HP laptop because of it.

[tp4tissue]

well, anything from asus is a bad pc

Can you explain your joke?

asus laptops are notoriously warm running...

TBH I've had worse experiences with HP laptops. Almost every single one with AMD CPUs overheats and fries the motherboard after like 2 years. Personally dealt with 5 such cases of this, and will never buy an HP laptop because of it.

the problem with those was that because the amd cpus ran so hot, the fans on average ran at higher rpm..

and the higher rpm leads to higher dust buildup.. which means..... even more heat.. more dust.. it's a dust-heat spiral..

If however you clean out the Inside of the cooler,, the laptop will run like day one..

if you look at the image below.. that inevitably happens to EVERY laptop..  happens faster to warmer running laptops than cooler running ones..

the only way to fix it is to take the cooler assembly apart.. usually not accessible.. without disassembling the entire board.


Manufacturers can actually make this section easily accessible and cleanable, but alas, they don't want to, they'd rather have you buy a new laptop..

[paicrai]

ive heard toasters are pretty bad

[iLLucionist]

Compaq Presario 2200 Desktop:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Presario_2200

It was horrible. It was actually sold with a "Pentium inside" processor, but it was a f***king cyrix. I felt so ripped of. GPU shared memory. Horrible display. Lots of IRQ conflicts (Win95, not second edition). The buttons on the front panel stopped working with six months, the cd drive became flaky within one year.

But well, for as far as nostalgia goes, it played Command and Conquer and some FPS so I was happy. Also, it ran VB 5.0 and Borland Delphi 4.0 quite well.

The only thing that still seems to work, is the display that came with it.

[iLLucionist]

Toshiba laptop with Vista. It was purchased about a week after Vista launched. And that's how I became a fan of Macs.

SO THAT WAY YOU COULD BE A FAN OF THE ONLY THING THAT WAS WORSE THAN WINDOWS VISTA?

He said Mac, not ME

[Fire Brand]

well, anything from asus is a bad pc

Can you explain your joke?

asus laptops are notoriously warm running...

TBH I've had worse experiences with HP laptops. Almost every single one with AMD CPUs overheats and fries the motherboard after like 2 years. Personally dealt with 5 such cases of this, and will never buy an HP laptop because of it.

the problem with those was that because the amd cpus ran so hot, the fans on average ran at higher rpm..

and the higher rpm leads to higher dust buildup.. which means..... even more heat.. more dust.. it's a dust-heat spiral..

If however you clean out the Inside of the cooler,, the laptop will run like day one..

if you look at the image below.. that inevitably happens to EVERY laptop..  happens faster to warmer running laptops than cooler running ones..

the only way to fix it is to take the cooler assembly apart.. usually not accessible.. without disassembling the entire board.


Manufacturers can actually make this section easily accessible and cleanable, but alas, they don't want to, they'd rather have you buy a new laptop..

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Every HP/Compaq DV xxxx laptop ever created, hate the things the amount of times I have seen, them with issues bleh never going to buy anything from HP also put me off Nvidia for a while since they where selling fautly GPU's to HP you can still buy them as a plastic keychain >_>

[deltuhhh]

My HP laptop oh god.

[JaccoW]

I used to have a desktop from HP with a Pentium D CPU, one of the first dual cores that comprised of two dies slapped together. After a while it would randomly shut down without warning and wouldn't start anymore. It was not a heat related thing either and after six trips back to their RMA service where they replaced pretty much all the internals I sent a letter to ask for my money back.
The money was used to build my first PC which is still working till this day.

I was never able to figure out what it was. :/

[Turkishrambo]

Wonder why this customer's computer was turning off

[tp4tissue]

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Wonder why this customer's computer was turning off

is he a smoker?

[belac]

mmm... love that dust buildup.  reminds me of my days back when I worked in IT at the hospital. 1000s of PC's with too few caretakers. most looked like that on the inside.

[tp4tissue]

mmm... love that dust buildup.  reminds me of my days back when I worked in IT at the hospital. 1000s of PC's with too few caretakers. most looked like that on the inside.

I thought hospitals had the special air filters..

[Coreda]

Manufacturers can actually make this section easily accessible and cleanable, but alas, they don't want to, they'd rather have you buy a new laptop..

Show Image

My last laptop allowed for this via a little section on the side, removable with screws. Dust built up again fairly quickly though.

As for worst computer I've owned? Probably would be a Toshiba Satellite laptop ages ago running Windows 98. Crashes were a fairly regular occurance. Installed XP on it later which made it more bearable.

Actually tried a laptop with Windows 3.1 given to me by an uncle who was into old computers. Not too shabby, but certainly no Mac OS. Somehow stumbled upon a PC mag column about the editor-in-chief still using it. I'd like to imagine it's true, even though it was published April 1st  ^-^

[tp4tissue]

Manufacturers can actually make this section easily accessible and cleanable, but alas, they don't want to, they'd rather have you buy a new laptop..

Show Image

My last laptop allowed for this via a little section on the side, removable with screws. Dust built up again fairly quickly though.

As for worst computer I've owned? Probably would be a Toshiba Satellite laptop ages ago running Windows 98. Crashes were a fairly regular occurance. Installed XP on it later which made it more bearable.

Actually tried a laptop with Windows 3.1 given to me by an uncle who was into old computers. Not too shabby, but certainly no Mac OS. Somehow stumbled upon a PC mag column about the editor-in-chief still using it. I'd like to imagine it's true, even though it was published April 1st  ^-^

which laptop is this that had the slide

[Coreda]

which laptop is this that had the slide

Toshiba Tecra A2. Loved it. I'm sure there would be others with a removable section, but I suppose more recent computers are tending to favor all-in-one designs.

[D01]

Honestly the Asus desktop my wife bought a year ago.  I've had good luck with Asus products over the years when assembling a pc but this thing seems like they took every bad part they had a threw it in a case.

[tp4tissue]

Honestly the Asus desktop my wife bought a year ago.  I've had good luck with Asus products over the years when assembling a pc but this thing seems like they took every bad part they had a threw it in a case.

Asus, I've heard is fine.. Acer is the one you gotta worry about ... haha .. even the womenz no Acer is not to be trusted.

[tp4tissue]

which laptop is this that had the slide

Toshiba Tecra A2. Loved it. I'm sure there would be others with a removable section, but I suppose more recent computers are tending to favor all-in-one designs.

more like, -recent computers favor the fvk you customers are sheep to be farmed- design...


That laptop is sooo awesome.. my god... that feature can easily extend the life of the laptop by 5-8 years....

[microsoft windows]

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Wonder why this customer's computer was turning off

Looks slightly dusty there.

[blackbox]

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Wonder why this customer's computer was turning off

Heatsinkbrownie.  Someone should make fan filters for heat sinks. Like an easy to clean one.

[katushkin]

These thin clients at work pretty much suck ass. My WASD no longer works on them and they are slow as ****. (yes I have 2 screens and 20 windows open at once, but I neeeeed them goddamit!)

one of the guys in another department is going to push a new build to mine over the network for more USB power to see if I can get my WASD working again.

[D01]

These thin clients at work pretty much suck ass. My WASD no longer works on them and they are slow as ****. (yes I have 2 screens and 20 windows open at once, but I neeeeed them goddamit!)

one of the guys in another department is going to push a new build to mine over the network for more USB power to see if I can get my WASD working again.

Aye.  The thin clients I have to deal with at work are crap as well.

[blackbox]

These thin clients at work pretty much suck ass. My WASD no longer works on them and they are slow as ****. (yes I have 2 screens and 20 windows open at once, but I neeeeed them goddamit!)

one of the guys in another department is going to push a new build to mine over the network for more USB power to see if I can get my WASD working again.

Aye.  The thin clients I have to deal with at work are crap as well.

I work with Wyse t10 thin clients at work and they work great. Ofc thin clients depends very much on the infrastructure.

[inteli722]

My old Dell Latitude D800 with the Pentium M and a gig of RAM. Had to use that thing through 2009 cuz poor.

[davkol]

I used a D400 in 2009, but didn't consider it to be a problem, except uneven screen backlighting and bad battery life.

[berserkfan]

At present I am very angry.

You guys can see my threads about computer problems.

Frustrated as heck.

So I'll say, ALL COMPUTERS WITH MICROSOFT OS. Doesn't matter which computer.

[thesupergeek]

Worst computer ever has to be my plastic MacBook 2,1. The sides chipped, the keyboard was very squishy, the hard drive failed once every two months, it overheated, the battery died after 20 cycles. Worst POS I have ever won at a developers conference. Eventually stuck it under my desk, booted it up on to a Debian flash drive, and used it to monitor my network. That is all it is worth to me now.

[ShawnMeg]

I used one of those old iMac G3's with the round base,  swivel neck monitor and round speakers.  It lagged from the start even with maxing out the RAM.

[microsoft windows]

I used one of those old iMac G3's with the round base,  swivel neck monitor and round speakers.  It lagged from the start even with maxing out the RAM.

I remember those. Think they had G4 CPU's in them though. They were pieces of ****.

[tp4tissue]

I used one of those old iMac G3's with the round base,  swivel neck monitor and round speakers.  It lagged from the start even with maxing out the RAM.

I remember those. Think they had G4 CPU's in them though. They were pieces of ****.

I remember using it to do some 3d cad.. renders took like an hour..

[microsoft windows]

I used one of those old iMac G3's with the round base,  swivel neck monitor and round speakers.  It lagged from the start even with maxing out the RAM.

I remember those. Think they had G4 CPU's in them though. They were pieces of ****.

I remember using it to do some 3d cad.. renders took like an hour..

Only an hour? You must have been using the fast 1GHz version. The 800MHz G4's were so slow they ran backwards.

[Senthura]

The Dell Optiplex computers in the shared lab at school. They're like 5 years old and are SO slow. It takes 5 minutes before you can log in. Any time I have a project or something and we have to use those I just do it on my laptop, put it on a flash drive, and use them to print it if a wireless printer isn't available.

[ShawnMeg]

The Dell Optiplex computers in the shared lab at school. They're like 5 years old and are SO slow. It takes 5 minutes before you can log in. Any time I have a project or something and we have to use those I just do it on my laptop, put it on a flash drive, and use them to print it if a wireless printer isn't available.

Probably, there's so much s hit on the hard drive that it gets bogged down.  I have an Optiplex at work with an i5 and SSD running Win 7 Enterprise, small form factor.  It's wonderful.  The business class computers Optiplexes, as I understand, use better components.  I've had this computer for 2 years and never turned it off.  It's been rock solid, never a BSOD,, never lagging. 

[korrelate]

anything osx lion.

[Elrick]

I used one of those old iMac G3's with the round base,  swivel neck monitor and round speakers.  It lagged from the start even with maxing out the RAM.

I remember those. Think they had G4 CPU's in them though. They were pieces of ****.

I remember using it to do some 3d cad.. renders took like an hour..

Only an hour? You must have been using the fast 1GHz version. The 800MHz G4's were so slow they ran backwards.

Yes, when OSX hit all those older cpus and motherboards they were literally real slow and useless to ever use again.   I use to remember had to go and make a cup of coffee sit down with a biscuit and finish the coffee and biscuit and still arrive to my Apple whilst to was still working on finishing an Excel spreadsheet calculation.

That was when a jumped on over to the Dark Side, and never looked back.  I still despise Jobsie for what he did to that once great PC manufacturer that went on to produce hardware that was so slow compared to anything Gatesie had made after 2009.

Imagine being beaten in Photoshop by a lower performance PC outfit when you've just wasted over $4'500AUD on a Powermac Tower  .

[blackbox]

The Dell Optiplex computers in the shared lab at school. They're like 5 years old and are SO slow. It takes 5 minutes before you can log in. Any time I have a project or something and we have to use those I just do it on my laptop, put it on a flash drive, and use them to print it if a wireless printer isn't available.

Probably, there's so much s hit on the hard drive that it gets bogged down.  I have an Optiplex at work with an i5 and SSD running Win 7 Enterprise, small form factor.  It's wonderful.  The business class computers Optiplexes, as I understand, use better components.  I've had this computer for 2 years and never turned it off.  It's been rock solid, never a BSOD,, never lagging.

Since optiplex is Dells line of business-oriented computer there is no other versions of optiplexes. They have had issues with components in the optiplex line. Most notably the capacitors used in the optiplex sx270. Opened a sx270 some months ago and 90% of the capacitors where bad.

[Turkishrambo]

Hahaha i was reminded by a really old p3 computer of this... i had totally forgotten. Back when a power button would kill the power to your computer completely no matter what.

[Senthura]

The Dell Optiplex computers in the shared lab at school. They're like 5 years old and are SO slow. It takes 5 minutes before you can log in. Any time I have a project or something and we have to use those I just do it on my laptop, put it on a flash drive, and use them to print it if a wireless printer isn't available.

Probably, there's so much s hit on the hard drive that it gets bogged down.  I have an Optiplex at work with an i5 and SSD running Win 7 Enterprise, small form factor.  It's wonderful.  The business class computers Optiplexes, as I understand, use better components.  I've had this computer for 2 years and never turned it off.  It's been rock solid, never a BSOD,, never lagging.

Since optiplex is Dells line of business-oriented computer there is no other versions of optiplexes. They have had issues with components in the optiplex line. Most notably the capacitors used in the optiplex sx270. Opened a sx270 some months ago and 90% of the capacitors where bad.

Optiplex GX520. Cleared the hard drive and reinstalled the OS. Still pretty slow but functional. Better than nothing. They got new ones to kill and gave them away.

[Oobly]

I was assigned to a client project end of 2006. Had to use Celeron laptop with 128MB RAM for developing server side Java / PHP and Javacsript... Had to keep rebooting it to clear out the memory so the IDE would actually be responsive (Eclipse).