Mez wrote:For the above mentioned reasons, I will never buy another ASUS/Synaptics/MS/Intel product again! They can shove their shitty equipment and service where the sun don't shine 😁
long live Ubuntu !!!!
AMD/VIA and Linux fanboy detected.
On a more on-topic note. Here are a couple things that I regret buying:
- Dell Dimension 4300S - I saw this machine at RE-PC (our local recycler) thinking that it would be a good candidate for a 9x machine (I was in dire need of a 9x desktop back then) and with the $30 price tag, I figured why not take the chance? So I took it home, installed Windows 98SE and all the drivers I needed on it, and ran some games on it.
First of all: The integrated audio chip is a SoundMax chipset which doesn't support DirectSound acceleration, so a couple games either refused to output sound or outputted distorted sound, which led to using a PCI sound card, which also had some horrors (to be mentioned later).
Second: The expansion slots it has are a low-profile AGP slot and two full-height PCI slots on a riser, severely limited upgrade potential to the point where I had a hard time finding a graphics card that was better than the original ATI Rage 128 Ultra AGP card, I know some of you always rely on the Geforce 4Ti cards for a high-end 9x machine, but because there's no such thing as a low-profile GF4Ti card, the only alternatives that didn't cost an arm and a leg were 1) a LP AGP nVidia Geforce4 MX440, 2) a PCI ATI Radeon 9100, 3) a LP AGP ATI Radeon 9250, and 4) a LP AGP nVidia Geforce FX 5200. I had option 4 to spare so I went with that, until you mentioned that the FX5200 sucked even for 9x gaming, which led to option 1, which led to me having to experiment with different nVidia driver versions since 81.98 didn't cut it, worked fine for me, until I saw this thread which nitpicked on how ATI video cards had better image quality than nVidia cards from the same period. Knowing how finding 128-bit versions of video card options 2 and 3 was going to be hard, I ended up junking the Dimension and resorting to buying an Optiplex GX150 tower for my 98 gaming fix.
And third: It had a s***ty 1.6 GHz Willamette Pentium 4 processor, another factor that made it both suck and a**. I could have used my spare 2 GHz Northwood Celeron instead (it surprisingly had better benchmarks!), but it's too late because I dumped it.
TL;DR. Don't rely on small form factor Pentium 4s for any type of gaming, not even 9x gaming, unless you like having headaches from trying to find good graphics and sound cards.
- Sound Blaster Live! Dell OEM CT4780 - As mildly mentioned in point 1 in the Dell 4300S argument, I bought a PCI sound card to take care of the integrated audio problem, this was the card I went for as I also found this at a cheap price at the same RE-PC store. Working Creative driver hell, here I come. The CT4780 card worked fine with the built-in drivers on Windows 2000 and XP, but for 98SE, I had to resort to LONG and HARD searches to find drivers that really worked with this SB Live! model, and when I finally found them, they stopped working after a month. Luckily, I managed to score a CT4670 at the same RE-PC a year later, and thanks to it working with the much easier to find official Creative driver package, I no longer have to go through this painful process again. I still have the CT4780, it's currently in my Dell Dimension 4600 which is being used for audio transfer.
I'd list more items, but since this list is already so long and it's dinner time for me at the time of typing, I'll be sure to come back later with some more stuff. I'll be sure to mention the Dell Latitude CPi motherboard that I bought a couple months ago (even we Dell toleraters run into some bad Dell hardware sometimes).