[RESOLVED] ?th annual Worst Computer Awards

[firemonkey]

ok this is a long shot, but going off of pi$$ poor planing...Micron, I was working on one, the sats were great, Athlon XP 1800 +, a dvd drive, 16x burner, 40 gig 7200 drive, 256 megs,64 meg agp video, 2 80 mm case fans, and one on the board! over all a nice setup. but then reality setin, I saw the PS it was 250, now I was alway under the impression that you needed at least 300 for athlons. Whats up with that?

[ilovetheusers]

[quote]Originally posted by MacGyver:
<strong>There have been lots of threads about the worst computer components. But if you're talking off-the shelf PC's, then without a doubt, The Patriot Hot Wheels and Barbie PC's win that prize hands down. These things sucked so bad, they made eMachines look good. Tiny proprietary tower cases (in the themes of Hot Wheels and Barbie) which were impossible to expand upon, the buggiest chipset around (Intel 810), driver support is non existent, the company is bankrupt, and lots of families shelled out thousands of Christmas money on pre-orders which they completely lost when Patriot went belly-up.

Can anybody beat that?</strong><hr></blockquote>

I almost bought one of the hot wheels PC's. They looked cool.

[JungleMan1]

[quote]Originally posted by ilovetheusers:
<strong>

I almost bought one of the hot wheels PC's. They looked cool.</strong><hr></blockquote>

We ought to beat you over the head with a very large baseball bat you shameful one

[Mayhem]

The Old Acer in the "Clamshell" case. If you ever have to take one apart, God help you getting it back together.

[Wayward Clam]

[quote]Originally posted by *MAYHEM*:
<strong>The Old Acer in the "Clamshell" case. If you ever have to take one apart, God help you getting it back together.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Hey! What's wrong with Clamshells?

[Mayhem]

[quote]Originally posted by Wayward Clam:
<strong>

Hey! What's wrong with Clamshells? </strong><hr></blockquote>

Sorry, I meant no Offense. But a case that splits down the middle from the top and fold down on both sides, and is made of cheap, thin plastic is just not a good idea.

[*SlyVenom*]

[quote]Originally posted by raptorGT:
<strong>HARD DRIVES ========================
Best: Western Digital 40, 60, 80, and 100 Gb 7200 RPM, ATA 100 drives.
Worst:
3) Seagate
2) Maxtor
1) Fujitsu - Electronic components actually fell off this drive during shipment!
</strong><hr></blockquote>

I would have to disagree, any hard drive can be bad, I have found IMO Maxtor to be one of the better drives out there, and Western Digital to be one of the worst, as far as short life spans and failure rates go...
[quote]Originally posted by KINGofBLEH:
<strong>PC chips mobo
S3 virge video
2x internal Panasonic CD-ROM
Soundblaster 16 ISA sound
Maxtor HDD
Any Winmodem
YCL NIC
Serial Mouse
AT Keyboard
Windows 95a
--------------------

System specs: Athlon Tbird 1.0 Ghz, 512Mb PC133 SDRAM, 60Gb Maxtor HD, 40Gb Seagate HD, 32MB Diamond Stealth S450, Riptide 16bit audio, HP 8x4x32 CDRW, Hitachi GD-7500 DVD.
</strong><hr></blockquote>


Dude you're complaining about parts that are in your own system... ie maxtor hard drive

[Mad Machinist]

Quote from earlier post:By these rules I would have to say the worst were the ALL USB no other ports machines built by Compaq and Gateway.

How would you acess the bios on such a beast....?
I ask as I have a dual processor PII board that the ps2 ports are supposedly bad....haven't played with it yet cause I'm still scrounging processors.

[Gollo]

[quote]Originally posted by firemonkey:
<strong>I saw the PS it was 250, now I was alway under the impression that you needed at least 300 for athlons. Whats up with that?</strong><hr></blockquote>

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong but you do NOT need a 300w psu to run an athlon they just recommend it. More juice is obviously better if you have a RAID setup with 4 drives and a cd-burner and a DVD and your juicy video card and your... well you get the picture. Also the "approved" psu only have a fan that circulates air through it better than the "non-approved" units. Like I said somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

[edgecrusher47]

The "approved" power supply is supposed to draw the air across the CPU and expel it out the back of the case. Whether or not many PSUs do this is another matter entirely...
As for the 250 watt PSU, most OEMs put lower wattage units in PCs for whatever reason. IMHO, the most important thing is quality. A cheap 300 watt will perform the same as a nice 250 watt. Cheap PSUs tend to be light as a feather, while nice ones can be pretty heavy...

Now what was this topic about again? Oh well...

Peace,
Evan

[ilovetheusers]

[quote]Originally posted by JungleMan:
<strong>

We ought to beat you over the head with a very large baseball bat you shameful one </strong><hr></blockquote>


Hey - they were blue with flames on them! They rocked. They were also smaller than a power cube. Hmmm, maybe I'll go get me some flame stickers for me computer...

[SageofKorel]

Zenith P100 by far are the worst.... Read the specs on it when I was on the AF work in the Tech shop. They wanted us to upgrade ok I went to upgrade jumper settings there Installed a 133.. Damn computer started to smoke.. Called Zenith ohhh there is a Peco Fuse that blows when you try to upgrade past 100.... grrrrrrrrrr

[Brewer]

eMachines, by far the worst Pc on the market today. I've worked on a good number of 'em, they all have problems, big problems. What did you expect for $400.00 from BestBuy??? Oh yo uwanted actually be able to load Office 2000 on it without crashing?? Bring it Back to Best Buy, get another one.... yada yada yada

EEEEYUCK!

[Scuba Steve]

Worst computers:
Dishonorable mention:

HP 1ghz slot-A Athlon with a 145w PSU, came in because it was locking up. The unit came stock with NO cpu fan! It had a bit of ductwork which used the back case fan to draw air out of the case (that didn't have room to put my fist in.)

The plus was that this particular HP had an almost stock ASUS mobo in it (K7V with an AGP slot). Transferred to a roomier case with plenty of fans and he was off and running (300watt PSU).

Absolute worst:

PCwave / PCChips prebuilts! 599 socket7 mobo with built in NIC, PCtel 56k modem, onboard sound. Had 30 (yes 30) RMA boards in stock due to at least half of them going bad in the first 6-12 months.

The mobo's themselves were semi-OK when ordered seperately, but someone must have been rubbing cats against the boards for the prebuilts!

The modem and the soundcard are interdependent, if the sound card needs to be replaced, the on-board modem is useless. And any other modem that goes in will not work, you have to use the little proprietary modem riser card (not even as good as an AMR or CMR).

And as if that's not bad enough, the PSU is almost an exact replacement part for the little wimpy 145 PSU's in emachines. And to start the board you sometimes had to put the DIMM in slot3 instead of slot1! (No joke!!!)

Worst parts?

PC Wave/PC Chips mobo's (this includes Amptron mobo's and those stupid BookPC's)

Savage chipset videocards

IoMagic/ MagicSpin CD-ROM drives

USRobotics Winmodems that only take com5, (which AOHell doesn't like)

PCtel modems / Any modem with a hardware minimum

ASOUND sound cards

"Restore CD's"

Compaq computers before they got around to using a real bios (not a hard drive partition)

Any mobo that I can't put in a standard case!

[houseisland]

Without a doubt the largest pile of steaming elephant dung ever put forth disguised as a computer is the AST Manhattan V server, dual P133s, proprietary everything, incredibly unstable, etc., etc. Worse support than Patriot's support for the Hot Wheels/Barbie PCs. I know of at least 5 unfortunate companies unlucky enough to have purchased these items. None ever really worked.