Our first x86 PC was a 386SX-16MHz. It was my parents' deal really, but I regret it. That machine was underpowered for games within the 1st year of ownership, and hopeless after that.
Every try playing X-Wing on a 386SX-16? I adopted a gameplay style that managed the framerate so the missions wouldn't become unplayable.
Ultima 7? I can't believe how patient I was with that game. Ever have those dreams where you have trouble moving and everything is deliberate and labored? That's Ultima 7 on a 386SX-16.

PCChips 486 VLB motherboard - This was the basis of my family's first home-build PC. We bought the cheapest 486 board we could find. Yep, we ended up with a variation of that PCChips 486 board that's discussed at length on redhill.
Any SVGA game would crash too much to be playable, most older VGA games were kinda stable but not really. Ultima 7 was the worst - it crashed within seconds. And this is why I had to take a vacation from Ultima 7 and didn't beat it until even later, by which time it was more a sense of overdue obligation than enjoyment.

VIA MVP3 and K6-3 system - Coming from our socket-7 Cyrix (which was actually a good computer), I was trying to spec out an economical upgrade. I don't know what the prices were anymore, but I should have tried to get a 440BX board w/ a Celeron 300A. Bonus is that this could have also supported a significant CPU upgrade in the future. But I didn't know anything about overclocking back then nor was I comfortable with the idea.
Today though, I kind of like this super-7 system and am currently playing around with it. So maybe I don't totally regret it.
And in today's market, the K6-3 is more valuable I guess. I can (and have) acquired the Intel stuff cheaply. A pyrrhic victory.

Gigabyte GA-790XTA-UD4 (AM3) This is still my current "modern" system. The first of these boards that I bought was failing to recognize the VID from the CPU and was only running Vcore at 1.0v. Thus it was stable if I underclocked the CPU but otherwise it was unstable. Such a simple defect should have been caught at the factory. I've seen a picture of a Gigabyte factory tour (the same tour my avatar pic is from, actually) where they show people testing motherboards. Either they only do that when the cameras show up, or they just POST test and don't actually read the health monitor info. Make lesser mistakes, Gigabyte.

The replacement board (from the retail store) came with bent pins inside the box. This board seemed to work and I kept it, but I discovered much later that S3 standby (suspend to RAM) does not work on this board. It always wakes up dead, even with all settings at safe defaults. S3 standby simply does not work.

I'm also having chronic problems with an apparent PSU overload when I switch the system on. Occasionally the PSU will trip overload and shut down, forcing me to unplug the PSU to reset it and try again. I want to punch a kitten when this happens. This has continued despite multiple changes of video cards and an upgrade from a quality 550W AcBel PSU to a quality 800W Delta PSU. I have little else to blame but the board.
Around the same time a relative bought a Gigabyte 785G based motherboard which proved to have a defective eSATA port. In a few months that board died mysteriously.
Hate to be a fanboy but I didn't have a good experience with a Gigabyte HD4350 card either. "Ultra Durable" era Gigabyte gear all seems to come broken from the factory. The game is whether you have found what's broken yet. 😀

Every inkjet printer - Who needs color. Who needs the aggravation. Laser all the way.

shamino wrote:

Every inkjet printer - Who needs color. Who needs the aggravation. Laser all the way.

Oh man I'm with you on that one - I took a long break from owning a printer due to my exasperating experiences with inkjets in the past, but was recently talked out of a laser and into a colour inkjet by the sales guy / my wife and kids. "We need colour!". It burns through expensive ink, won't accept third party ink, and won't even let you continue to print with black if one of the other colours is low. Such a scam.

ATI Radeon 5650 - Bought it as a temporary replacement to my GTX 8800 which died. It was much slower than my previous GTX 8800 and noisy. Had to purchase a second hand Radeon 5870 soon after to be able to play World of Warcraft in acceptable framerate (which was the game I was hooked on at that time).

badmojo wrote:

won't accept third party ink

Sounds like an HP printer to me.

shamino wrote:

Every inkjet printer - Who needs color. Who needs the aggravation. Laser all the way.

badmojo wrote:

It burns through expensive ink, won't accept third party ink, and won't even let you continue to print with black if one of the other colours is low. Such a scam.

Yeah, printers have to be some of the most aggravating pieces of technology in existence. Especially HP printers and their useless customer support ("Are you sure your printer is on?", "Check if there is paper in the tray", and so on... 😒 ).

A couple of weeks ago, I put my HP DeskJet out of its misery with a hammer... I only used it a few times a year, but each time I needed it a different problem prevented me from printing, such as the need to align/clean printheads several times in order to get half decent results (which consumes lots of the expensive ink), shoddy drivers (unable to find the printer on Wi-Fi or cancel print jobs unless I restart it), and the aforementioned inability to print in B&W if the color cartridge is low.

That's it, no more printers for me from now on. Whenever I have the need to print something, I'll do it at work.

I have an HP DeskJet F4135 that'll lock itself and in order for me to print, I have to reset my computer and force a power cycle on my printer. My PSC 750 always works without issues, and the printer I would always rely on is my Citizen GSX-230 Dot-Matrix printer since that's built like a tank and still prints out wonderfully for a 20+ year old printer.

I had a DeskJet 3740 that was possessed (the inkjet head was knocking back and forth), and a crappy Epson XP-410 printer that had a head clog issue and wouldn't print squat and I put that thing out of its misery (my old Stylus Color 640 was better, but that stopped working years ago).

I ditched inkjet printers years ago.

Rules for HP.
1. Their drivers suck - they usually never release anything newer than what the printer originally came with.
2. Their software takes an eternity to install - Oh yeah, it really should take 15-30 minutes to install printer software.. NOT!
3. Their drivers suck.

My current color laserjet printer is an HP... the way the old as dirt software package installs makes printing PDF files extremely slow. The defualt HP port setup is crap. Change the port to a standard TCP/IP port and it works dandy.

The printer I wish I never bought was the second laserjet printer I had. It was a Konica Minolta. Despite the printer being sold new when Vista was already out, they never released drivers for Vista... idiots. Even worse driver support than HP which is almost impossible. Guess Konica had to one-up HP in the crappy driver support department.

I did eventually get it working in Vista by using a Vista driver for a different model Konica printer.. even though Konica claimed that it was impossible for this particular printer to work in Vista.

Also, they remove the drivers for their older printers (and hardware) every 5 years. Nowadays, I use the new fashion method: use Linux as the print server and supply drivers for x86 and x64 OSes (Windows 9x-10 Pro) with ease.

It took me ages to find the drivers for my Pavilion N3350.

🤣 @ this thread. So much rage.

Someone up top mentioned CD-ROM drives with fans. I've wondered about that. I took an old drive apart for cleaning a while ago and noticed that, although it didn't have a fan, there was a little vent in the back of the case and mounting slot for a small fan inside. It was apparently originally designed to take a fan but this was later dropped from the production model or later revisions.

Keeping computer stuff cool is good, but it sounds like a bad idea to be sucking dust into an optical laser device. I'm guessing that's why fan-cooled optical drives didn't last long.

Let me add another couple:

- Asus P4P800E deluxe: when the cpu socket (478) was closed, with the cpu in it, I could simply pull out the cpu by grabbing the cooler. At POST the board did mention every time that a new cpu was detected.. 😵

- HP Omnibook 6000: cpu cooler has design fault which nearly overheats the cpu and then shuts laptop down. Bought brand new cpu cooler from HP. Didn’t fix the problem 😠

- Any Philips product from the 80’s, including monitors and computers 😐 I’ve owned many, many MSX computers over the past 15 years and they all had issues, most of them had defective disk drives and/or bad video signal. I seriously hate this brand.

A GTX970... apparently the fan runs at 35% at idle all times. There is a newer firmware but just so happens to be it the EVGA video card I have does NOT support fans at 0% or running less than 35%. So that means it makes an annoying hum and is quite audible.

When I first installed my GTX960 I thought it was busted because the fans didn’t appear to spin at all - it still gets noisy when working hard but have been very happy with its idle behaviour

As it was already mentioned, a PNY Geforce FX 5200 128 MB. Terrible perfomance. After a while, its cooler has died and some artifacts has appeared. The whole package.

IBM PS/2 65sx.

Microchannel is a neat curiosity, but it means the machine practically cannot be expanded.

What a fool I was.

Celeron 300 (not 300A) . I eventually did buy a 300A and traded the 300 .

SquallStrife wrote:

IBM PS/2 65sx.

Microchannel is a neat curiosity, but it means the machine practically cannot be expanded.

What a fool I was.

Same, though I only paid around 10€ for it. Still, I have multiple 286/386/486 systems that I got "because they were cheap" and I have no intention to ever use these and it's a pita to try and sell/ship them as most will only go for 30-40€. 😵

This is gonna be a weird one - an Amiga CDTV, with two controllers, the rare matching black keyboard & original mouse, 1084 monitor, dual external floppies, and a bunch of software. Now why the hell would I regret buying that??

...because I'd been looking around for a more advanced (AGA) Amiga for ages, and eventually settled on the CDTV since it was all I could find, figuring I could upgrade it. Once I had it, I started wading into the murky swamp of barely-compatible, hilariously-overpriced & unobtainable Amiga upgrades, and soon realized it was never, ever going to get expanded to the point where it would do what I want. I just wasn't prepared to sink used-car levels of cash into it.

Not only that, the external floppy drives both turned out not to work and the CD-ROM would barely read pressed discs & made a hell of a racket doing it (forget about CD-Rs.) Without a reliable way to get software onto it I couldn't even use it as an A500.

It went back up for sale, and took months to sell, and actually getting someone meet up and take it off my hands was like pulling teeth from a hyena. I did get my money back out of it, but totally not worth the aggravation.

So what's the problem? Well, RIGHT as I finally managed to rage-sell it and declare myself "Out of Amigas forever!", a working, nicely-expanded A3000 tower popped up locally for an insanely good price ($375 IIRC.) If I hadn't gone through months of frustrating and hateful CDTV ownership I would have snapped that up in an instant. Instead I decided to Let Someone Else Deal With It, and eventually the ad disappeared.

Anyway, I'm still Out of Amigas, unless someone wants to sell me a comparable A1200, 3000 or 4000, cheap. 😜 Not really interested in messing around with OCS or non-HDD machines. Been kicking myself for AGES about that 3000T though.

Creative 3D Blasters Voodoo 2 SLI - all the 3DFX hoopla sucked me into buying these for a pretty penny. So far period correct games working with them have been hit or miss, Moto Racer 2 (miss!) most notably. Maybe a pair of Diamond Monsters would fare better I don't know but all the headaches have not been worth it in my view.

LG Optical Drives.

I'd had good luck with them in the early 2000's, but when I started focusing on HTPC builds, I started to put in HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drives. I had 2 high end Burners that cost a pretty penny. Both failed just outside of the year warranty period. I switched to Asus and never looked back.

nVidia RivaTNT2 Vanta video card.

To be fair, this was made crappier by my lack of knowledge. Should have known it wouldn't be any faster on a Pentium 166 MHz than my old Voodoo.
The poor chip didn't have chance in a faster rig and here it was bottlenecked by CPU and RAM.