I have two of those 6x yamaha drives... also an 8x version... all of them still "work" and can overburn... one has a dead fan, but all of them burns fucked up discs that ONLY those drives can read... some weird stupid shit with the firmware that prevents any other drive from reading them

anything I burned with my 4x matshita still works

Another lemon I recall buying was the 1st version of the Powerleap PL-iP3/T Tualatin Slotket adapter. It made my BX board somewhat unstable and I ended up sticking it in a drawer and buying a new motherboard instead. Supposedly the issue was addressed in the 2nd version.

Those RealMagic Hollywood+ cards had fantastic VGA and TV output quality. Easily as good as some of the more expensive DVD players around at the time. Plus they ran on even lowly machines such as Pentium 133s. I remember my brother using the unofficial player that could play DivX files, was a cool little trick.

I still have one of these somewhere, plus I never knew about the unofficial player. Awesome. 😁

Cube 3D x300-se with hypermemory, not only it didn't work with my Biostar p4m-890 at the time it barely ran at all under vista on a asus p5n-sli.

A GTX280 that ended up wasting over $100 of my money when the seller on ebay scammed me out of my money by shipping a dead card.

Back in 2009 I spent 700SEK (~$100) on a shitty GeForce 6200A to 'upgrade' a computer that broke down six months later 🙁 Oh well, at least I didn't have to worry about the driver issues that plagued the 9200SE it had before.

I also underspent on my next PC by getting a Core2Duo instead of a Core2Quad, and a GTS250 instead of a GTX260. Then there was also a Microsoft Intellimouse 3000 with a stepless scrollwheel that didn't work and started to dissolve over time. I replaced it with a Logitech MX518 a few months later; not as good build quality, but a much better mouse in general.

nforce4max wrote:

Cube 3D x300-se with hypermemory, not only it didn't work with my Biostar p4m-890 at the time it barely ran at all under vista on a asus p5n-sli.

A GTX280 that ended up wasting over $100 of my money when the seller on ebay scammed me out of my money by shipping a dead card.

I think most of us are familiar with scams and parts that ended up defective.
I once bought a downgradeset (s754, a sempron and a pci-e motherboard I think). The memory would make memtest turn red instantly and the motherboard would only see half the memory I put in there for some reason.
There was something else wrong with that motherboard but I can't remember.
Only the processor worked but that was the one part I didn't need 😵

The only thing I bought that I questioned buying later was a Radeon x1650 Pro video card. My unlocked and overclocked Radeon 9500 was starting to feel slow in the latest games and even though the x1650 Pro was a big improvement, it still wasn't quite what I expected.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Another lemon I recall buying was the 1st version of the Powerleap PL-iP3/T Tualatin Slotket adapter. It made my BX board somewhat unstable and I ended up sticking it in a drawer and buying a new motherboard instead. Supposedly the issue was addressed in the 2nd version.

I'm not sure which Powerleap model I had, but it was the server edition of the SLOT 1 - Tualatin adapters. It allowed for a dual 440BX to run dual Tualatin III-S's. I got them for free from Powerleap for evaluation. If I recall, they sold for $150-$200 per adapter. After installing them, the computer ran fine for a few days, but would consistenty yield a BSOD after a 4-7 days of 24/7 operation. After this occured several days in a row, I finally popped open the case to discover that one of the CPU fans stopped turning. Apparently Powerleap's fans came from China and they admitted there were quality issues with them. I threw in dual 850 coppermines into my dual 440BX board and am still using it today.

There was another model I tried on a friend's computer. It was the non-server edition, which was cheaper. I upgraded his Slot 1 to a Tualatin 1.4GHz. It appeared to run great when I was formatting and reinstalling Windows on his machine, but later he told me the screen would freeze up every several days and he needed to reboot. After these two experiences, I decided the Tualatin belonged in a s370 board.

feipoa wrote:

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Another lemon I recall buying was the 1st version of the Powerleap PL-iP3/T Tualatin Slotket adapter. It made my BX board somewhat unstable and I ended up sticking it in a drawer and buying a new motherboard instead. Supposedly the issue was addressed in the 2nd version.

I'm not sure which Powerleap model I had, but it was the server edition of the SLOT 1 - Tualatin adapters. It allowed for a dual 440BX to run dual Tualatin III-S's. I got them for free from Powerleap for evaluation. If I recall, they sold for $150-$200 per adapter. After installing them, the computer ran fine for a few days, but would consistenty yield a BSOD after a 4-7 days of 24/7 operation. After this occured several days in a row, I finally popped open the case to discover that one of the CPU fans stopped turning. Apparently Powerleap's fans came from China and they admitted there were quality issues with them. I threw in dual 850 coppermines into my dual 440BX board and am still using it today.

There was another model I tried on a friend's computer. It was the non-server edition, which was cheaper. I upgraded his Slot 1 to a Tualatin 1.4GHz. It appeared to run great when I was formatting and reinstalling Windows on his machine, but later he told me the screen would freeze up every several days and he needed to reboot. After these two experiences, I decided the Tualatin belonged in a s370 board.

Have two of those Powerleap adapters that I got for a really good price to put in two of my Dell GX1's but I tried one out on my IBM Aptiva system first and had issues with the clock speed being reported incorrectly and the system running a lot slower than I expected for 1.4ghz. I found out later the problem was the guy I bought them from had installed P-III S chips in them and had been running them in systems designed for 133mhz bus and my Aptiva could only run 100mhz bus hence the speed being slower than expected. I had to wait until some 1.4ghz Tualerons came up for sale cheap before I could rectify the situation.

Stiletto wrote:

Those RealMagic Hollywood+ cards had fantastic VGA and TV output quality. Easily as good as some of the more expensive DVD players around at the time. Plus they ran on even lowly machines such as Pentium 133s. I remember my brother using the unofficial player that could play DivX files, was a cool little trick.

I still have one of these somewhere, plus I never knew about the unofficial player. Awesome. 😁

Yeah, playing DivX files on the big screen back then was awesome! As far as I remember the player only worked on Windows 9x and ME. There never was an XP version, not that it matters.

Found a link for you here 😀 http://www.videohelp.com/tools/DivXPlus

Two Conner Tape-Stor droves - the kind that hooked to the floppy drive connector. Slow as molasses in January. Once I got my first CD-R drive, they were destined for the landfill.

Quite a few. These come to mind.

Colorado Jumbo 250 tape drive - so slow didn't hold much. Software was buggy.
Iomega ZIP drive - I was one of the first to get one in Ohio from the distributor. I knew the guy. It started out great, but eventually would get the click of death and lost a lot of data.
Mediavision Pro Audio Spectrum

I've had bad motherboards, VIA chipsets, dying HDD's, etc, but those stick out the most. I did regret buying the Roland SCD-10 once, but that was because I sold it quickly to buy the SCD-15, which I should have done in the first place.

- an fx5200 because back then i assumed it was an upgrade from an mx 440

- a terratec pci sound card [ess solo-1?] because i hated it's fm synth

- an early liteon cdrw that was hopeless

- a usb zip drive and disks, cos i never used it, and also a jazz drive and disks 😵

- a haupaugge pci tv card and an adaptec usb tv contraption, cos they were terrible for losing the signal on my vhs footage

- fic pa2013's i bought as backups before i realised the damn motherboard was the root of my problems [ga5ax ftw imho]

- various things i bought cos they were there so i ended up with too much gear i then had to chuck or sell 🤣

- lots of gear I ended up selling after a brief use - the only way to experience things is often to buy them... in retrospect I sometimes wish I hadn't bothered 🤣

- and of course various dud's and doa's 😜

I had one of those Hauppauge WinTV PCI cards, and I rather liked it. I think I bought it in 1999 for about $100, which was a good deal at the time and well supported by software I used for ripping VHS tapes. Way better than the ATi version at least.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I had one of those Hauppauge WinTV PCI cards, and I rather liked it. I think I bought it in 1999 for about $100, which was a good deal at the time and well supported by software I used for ripping VHS tapes. Way better than the ATi version at least.

I still have my Hauppauge. Bought it in 1999 and used it with WinNT4. I also thought it worked pretty well. I "ripped" the movie Cube with it (VHS).

valnar wrote:

Quite a few. These come to mind. […]
Show full quote

Quite a few. These come to mind.

Colorado Jumbo 250 tape drive - so slow didn't hold much. Software was buggy.
Iomega ZIP drive - I was one of the first to get one in Ohio from the distributor. I knew the guy. It started out great, but eventually would get the click of death and lost a lot of data.
Mediavision Pro Audio Spectrum

What was the issue with the PAS? I bought one of those too and seem to remember not being very impressed either, maybe because I thought I was buying a 16 bit sound card which of course it was, if the game had native support for it. If not then it was just another SB clone.

I also had a hand me down WinTV... it worked pretty good... I used it to play my PSX, PS2, and Dreamcast since I didn't have space for a TV in my room... that card emulated a real TV so well that it fucks up if the signal has macrovision on it! It actually needed a video stabilizer in order to watch anything that has macrovision over the composite or s-video input

A 386 SX-16 motherboard with 1MB ram which could never run at it's full speed because it kept crashing. I think it had some dodgey DRAM which couldn't run at the full speed so most of the time I had to run with it's Turbo off. Being such a young todler, I was too scared to take it back to the shop and demand a refund/try and explain the crashing to an adult sales person! So most of the time it ran at 10mhz, until I finally got my 386DX40 upgrade.

I was also pretty peeved when I bought an Adlib card for $99AUD thinking it was bargain, just to see a week later the SB had dropped to $150 (I could have had speech for an extra $50!!!), then when I finally saved up my $150 and bought the SB card I longed for, just for it to drop to $99 a week later as well!!

my first computer was a 386SX/16... I (rather, my parents) got ripped off seriously being led to believe this was a state of the art machine back in 1992... a complete mom and pop special, with 4MB SLOOOW DIP RAM, and a 40MB HDD running off a flaky super I/O card... meanwhile, my cousin paid less for a 386DX/33 with better/faster RAM (no idea what type it is, probably SIP or SIMM) and also 40MB HDD.... the same prick ripped us off on a fax machine too

I couldn't get rid of it fast enough... by the time I tried to add an early ATAPI CD-ROM to it, the super I/O card failed and it was a forced upgrade to a P75 (money was very tight at the time)

I think the only thing I really regret is embarrassingly I was looking for a cheap psu that was quiet and I went to the computer fair and I asked if a particular psu was quiet (I didn't do any research) and they were like yeah yeah its very quiet so I naively bought a SHAW 860W Tri FAN PSU. I mean seriously did I have a brain there was no chance of that being quiet and the fact its essentially a generic 400W PSU with some paint and sleeved cables.

I mean it worked ok and wasn't unbelievably noisy but I did go and replace it a few months later with a Corsair TX650 so now I have a PSU that I'm never going to use since I don't want to burn the house down (Someone did some testing and it caught fire http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies. … 65103&p=7&#r124) but most of the regret is cause it became useless when I got a decent psu.

I regret an OEM board I got with a celeron 667 when I could of had a duron 850 if I wasn't so convinced about the necessity of the io shield.

I regret currently the 386 I bought the other day that smells awful and I'm too lazy to clean currently but not the one I bought that had a battery leak which I actually cleaned but haven't tried resoldering the broken tracks on the board. Interesting how I'd rather try to fix a broken mobo then clean a working one.

Other then that I haven't been particularly upset about my purchases even a matrox g400 didn't upset me much when I discovered that the 98 drivers were awful and I pretty much couldn't use it or a radeon 9600 (im guessing) had artifacts and never worked properly.