[RESOLVED] Worst Name Brand Computer

[derekb]

COMCRAP!!!!!!

Biggest piece of junk on the planet unless your willing to spend 10K or more. I just don't understand how they make such crappy desktops and great servers! I had a client that had a compaq that needed a new CD-ROM, the PC was only 2 years old and compaq NO LONGER MADE THE PART! They didn't even have a new CD-ROM that would fit into the drive bay! I had to drill holes into the drive bay to make it fit! Lets face it re-tooling your entire production line every 3 years to keep your hardware proprietary is just dumb! Compaq gets my vote above all the rest.

[Lia]

I have a dislike for pretty much any brand of laptop (except maybe IBM Thinkpads) and I've worked on plenty - Compaq, Acer, Texas Instruments, Dell, IBM, NEC, Digital. Have you ever had to reload a Compaq laptop without the restore CD? What a nightmare! You have to download about a hundred softpaq's off the net, and then install them in a very specific order.

Our judges currently use NEC laptops, and NEC has the worst support. Try telling a judge who has been without their laptop for a month, that NEC can't repair it, because they are waiting to receive the part from their factory in Japan, who haven't made the part yet?

But I think Compaq laptops top my list of bad equipment that I've had to work with. Funny, since their Professional Workstations and servers are great. (Except their worsktations are modular - kind of a pain when you need parts - have to get them through Compaq)

Desktops - I only have extensive experience with Digital, Compaq, and Dell brands. Luckily where I work,we have a standing offer with a company for a number of years and then buy and support/maintain a few hundred of them, so we can get good at supporting the same model. Dell seem to be the best so far.

[Sckott]

I'll be honest... I'm using an E-Machine as a network server... with a new power supply and Win98se. It's on 24/7 and no problems now for 7 months. Hey - it was FREE - (Customer gave up on it - sucker). Almost no hands on - it just sits there with a USB mouse riding shotgun, as an Unreal Tournament server. I play every night. The little puppy ROCKS because I took the time to tweak it here and there, and it's only a Celeron 400/96 meg. PGA 370.

As for Compaq, Gateway and now the HPs' basically going the same way, EVERYTHING sucks unless it's a white-box that I built that goes for a little over $800 COST.

You pay crap, you get crap. No matter WHO you give money too. If you apply this to any other hobbies, the way you think or eat, it makes you a better person in the ways you choose.

And if anyone from corporate companies wants to know, the reson computers get high in return is the crappy software that's loaded on them. People take a celeron 600 and it creeps.. They find that the new system they bought isn't any better than the one they replace, and they bring it back.

Sure. Load up that system tray. Even if for companies that pay you to load these poor things you're bulding. It keeps us all employed, sometimes handsomely. Compaq and others make their money in everything else but the consumer and his/her needs.

What's sad is it puts POS's in the hands of most consumers... BUT.. $$ =) For us...

-Sckott

[KCarter335]

Packard Bell - Is #1 on the crap list
E Machine - You get what you pay for... a disposable PC... By the looks of all of the other posts, I think all PC manufacturers have been named... What does that tell you??

[derekb]

COMCRAP!!!!!!

Biggest piece of junk on the planet unless your willing to spend 10K or more. I just don't understand how they make such crappy desktops and great servers! I had a client that had a compaq that needed a new CD-ROM, the PC was only 2 years old and compaq NO LONGER MADE THE PART! They didn't even have a new CD-ROM that would fit into the drive bay! I had to drill holes into the drive bay to make it fit! Lets face it re-tooling your entire production line every 3 years to keep your hardware proprietary is just dumb! Compaq gets my vote above all the rest.

[nfawcett]

I hate anything computer that comes from any retail stores. ie. Best Buy or Circuit City. But I'd rather work on a Compaq or Gateway any day than dealing with a piece of crap they call a computer...

MACINTOSH (Macintrash)

[theBeast]

Practically every manufacturer has their crappy systems, and their good systems.
Acers have their crappy Aspires, then they have their Veritons. Compaq has their Per-sorry-os, and their Deskpros.
Any thing sold at the retail level bites spicy bananas because they're trying to meet a certain price point. Do some digging, and you find that most manufacturers make higher end systems aswell, which are sold to corporations, but are also available to off-the-street customers, but at a premium prince.
The reason is that usually places like Future Shop, Radio Shack, Business Depot (Staples), would handle the better part of the technical problems with the systems...and they usually have a maximum of a 1 year warranty. With their business systems, however, the manufacturer usually has deals with these corporations, and offers 3 year on-site warranty. They don't want to waste their money sending techs out to fix these systems, so they build them hearty.

Think of it like the car industry. GM makes the Chevies and the Buicks. Chevies are cheap, crappy cars that would barely make it past the warranty, and once they did, then the owner is going to end up forking out hundres of dollars a month to keep the beast on the road. On the other hand, GM also builds Buick Skylarks, which are much better built, and after their warranty, you'll probably still have it running in excellent condition for many years.
I bought Chrysler Intrepid that was 4 years old. I've had to change minor things (links, tie-rods, had a minor leak in the tranny) but over all I haven't had any major earth-shattering problems with it. The largest bill I got for repairs was $1100, and that was for 4 new tires (because the cheap crappy ones I got at Sears wore out), a front end alignment (because the idiots who changed the tie-rods didn't bother aligning the front wheels...which also attributed to the tires wearing), new bearings, and new breaks (I don't know nuttin' about this car crap...so, I let my car go for a few years unmaintained...plus a 10,000k trip to Mississippi and back didn't do wonders on it's life either).

Point is: Every company makes crappy stuff, and they make good stuff. We always tell our customers (who scoff at our $2000 computers sans monitors, comparing these systems to the ones that Future Shop sells for $1599 the same specs, but with a monitor and printer) that if price is important to them, by all means, make the trip to Future Shop and buy that system. However, if quality and service are important, fork out the extra $600 and they'll be much more satisifed.

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***the Beast
- Fate drove me here...then told me to get out of the car...

[Vigilante]

Texas Instruments used to make laptops which I still have to service, they let Acer handle service, they suck too...

Pack Bell has to be one of the worst, I agree with the previous posts.

[u8drtsox]

PB is definately on the top of my POS list. Compaq Servers are great but the rest of their line of PC's and Laptops I can do without. I used to love Dell but since they have had their head shoved so far up Gates *** it's making me uncomfortable their reliable PC's have turned to absolute crap. I just rolled out 400 or so Desktops and Laptops and I have had to service almost every docking station, all the three stage processor cooling fans in the Latitude CPxH had to be replaced with a different one because the Decible level leaves you with a ringing in your ear at the end of the day. The desktops all of a sudden after normal operation generate the blue screen of death and then the system files become corrupt. Not easy to recover when the drive is formatted NTFS either. The MS Intellipoint mouse heats up and dies. Oh the list goes on.
AST/PB
IBM
NEC/PB
Gateway. (Got to big for their own britches and couldn't build a decent PC in the barn anymore.) I guess the environment wasn't clean enough. Horse **** doesn't go well with a Pentium III
HP - Yeuck!!!
So far no problems with Micron.
If you want a good reliable PC though, build it yourself. That's what I always do.

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Sometimes I fill my tub up with milk and blow bubbles

[theBeast]

I can safely say that I've never met an IPC that I liked, nor a Microtrend (I believe that's the company). Though both are no-name systems. Microtrend has gone out of business, and we've had scads of people weeping to us that their POC Microtrend system has a bad hard drive (JTS of course), and that we won't honour their warranty.
These are the same people that I've mentioned before that gasp when we say, "Sure, we can set up up with a complete system for $2300 plus tax. This will get you a nice 3 year parts and labour warranty, cross-ship warranty on the monitor for 3 years..."
90% of the time, people who buy these systems wind up saying, "We should have listened to you. We talked with other people who bought systems from you, and they've got nothing but praise for the service you offer!"

Our pricing really isn't that far off.
My wife, when she was still in school, needed to have a report printed out for Monday, and this was a Saturday afternoon (our store closes at noon, and I live 45min away). Her printer died, and she needed this report printed right away.
So, fine, our store was closed, so we chose to head down to Future Shop to buy a printer.
We checked out their printers, we didn't want anything crappy like an Epson, or a Canon, so we looked at the HPs. Future Shop had an HP 712C printer for $250. Our store sold the HP 710C printer for $299. It's the same printer, except the 712C is a FS exclusive, and warranty is handled through them rather than HP.
So, no problem. We pick one up.
The sales man then informs us that we need to buy a printer cable with it, or the warranty will be void. *Sigh*. Another $40 for the printer cable. Oh, we need paper too. That's another $7. So, the total after buying cable and paper is $297.
Our store, on the other hand sold the EXACT same printer for $299...however, we include the cable and paper, so we were $2 more than Future Shop.

So, we checked further. We retailed our Iomega Zip 250 USB drives for $248. Future Shop retailed them for $245. We then checked out the Per-sorry-os, and found that with our mark-up, we were very close to Future Shop's pricing.

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***the Beast
- Fate drove me here...then told me to get out of the car...

[Grendel]

Packard Bell. Since they're defunct in North America, I'll go with Compaq as the worst out there right now.

[braybk]

I agree with you all that Packard Bell and AST are the PC equivalent of a Yugo and are absolute junk.


However (and I realize I am seriously risking severe flaming here), I deal with Gateways almost exclusively and rarely have a problem. At any given time, I am responsible for somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 Gateways. Each year we buy some new ones to replace the oldest machines in our inventory. Over the last 3 or 4 years, I've only had to replace about 4 or 5 hard disks, 3 or 4 floppy drives, and 8 or 9 power supplies. The monitors fail more often, and I've had to replace quite a few of those, but other than that I've done next to nothing to them as far as hardware goes. Out of a revolving supply of 400 or so machines, that's not too bad. True, tech support is nonexistant. But when I do have to call them for replacement parts, they don't attempt to second-guess me on my 'diagnosis', and they ship me the parts immediately, which I get usually within 3 days.

Now I realize this post sounds like a Gateway commercial, but's it isn't. It's just my $0.02.



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-Geek used to be a four letter word. Now its a six-figure one.

[jbar1]

Sure as Techs we all should have great machines, however the public is bombarded with high dollar commericals touting all the great sh_t you get when you buy one of the major brands. I get tired of all the preload crap that no one ever uses stuck on the new machines. One of the best machines(before Compaq bought them out) was the Digital machines. You were asked just what you wanted on it and they used quality cards with no dumb modifications. We have a DX4x100 in the shop that with the exception of a 35GB hd and 128MB of ram is pretty much the way it came 6 years ago. We use it as a rental and customer loaner and it is easy to work on. ALL major companies have taken about 10 steps backwards in quality and in using propriatary cards and bios. If you cant solve Rubiks Cube you cant get in half of them and that makes a 1 hr job go to 1.5hrs. Yes it does keep us busy but at the same alot of customers seem to think it is our fault because they have an unstable machine coupled with an unstable OS. We sell a lot of AMAX systems and they are built pretty much the way we build them, just the way you want it. High quality MBs, off the shelf high end video an sound as with the rest of the hardware with lots of room in the case for big hands and extra goodies. I feel that ALL majors SUCKKKKKKK. But I think Dell Is one of the best of the Majors.

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If life is a bitch then what is death? I believe I will take the bitch!

[d_dcomp]

Packard Hell definitly has my vote as far as systems still in service, however PS/1 and PS/2 systems are probably the worst I have ever seen including the old old franklin apple IIe clones.

LOL



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Later days and better leis!!

[teckie]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by FeelMyPain:
Hi Guys, come on guys E-Machines is not that bad. They are making me a fortune and giving me job security. I receive at least two E-machines daily. [/QOUTE]

Oh yeah! Take a look at my recent escapaid.
http://forums.windrivers.com/cgi-bin...ML/002929.html

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Um...I really didn't need your help........ I was just testing you!