Never understood why ECS get so much stick, never had a problem with any of their boards and when they go for it they can make good stuff. In the 2000s, the PF5 kicked the shit out of the competing Asus boards and cost a lot less on top of it.
Things sure change. Brands of parts or complete systems?
Worst system brands, from what i have seen:
> Packard Bell - Really ugly to look at as well. Probably hurt HP's sales as most people thought they were the same company.
> IBM never really made anything good past the 286 era. Ugly too.
> Anything cobbled together by the local store, Peckham Computers, was bound to break down.
> Apple sucked at that time.
> Advent - PC World stuff.
> Time - From the UK, not really the worst as they were very cheap and used standard parts, you could make a decent system out of them if you had the patience but they would not win any races. Still, a lot are still running out there, so they did something right. I don't mind them, but they were sure limited out of the box.
> Tiny - UK again and often confused with Time. They were uglier to look at and used worse parts; Where Time liked ECS boards which at least worked, Tiny liked Wan Hung Lo boards with strange silkscreens... Oddly, they usually came with really good LG monitors right until the end, unstable Athlon's which smelled like burning with an awesome LG StudioWorks display...
> Elonex - Think they started in the 90s. Used by some government places, horrible.
> RM - Used by schools with their horrible "Window Box" software for the kiddies. Performed like crap, suspiciously similar to Tiny but still around.
Some of the best;
> Compaq - Goes without saying. Contura, Deskpro, Armada, Prolinea... Excellent systems that refused to die.
> HP - Got the job done, kind of a second go-to workhorse after the Deskpro.
> Dell - Yeah, I said it. Dell were pretty good back in the earlier days. They sure suck now ever since the latter half of the 90s.
> Zenith - For what time they were around, built some of the best laptops I have ever seen.
> Toshiba - They worked well.
> Everex - I think they were still around, if not, scratch that. Every Everex product I have ever seen has been solid though, so they make the list until I know otherwise.
> Mitac - Good budget boxes using fairly standard parts so you could always upgrade them. Suspect they were behind other labels like Akhter (Used by the military).
> Golding - A local builder making systems for nearby factories and such. Used very high quality parts (Strong cases, QDI motehrboards, Matrox VGA and stuff like that).
I could add more if I wanted to go into components, I might do later, but I have to go out now. Also, some really good industrial machines out there that don't seem to get much love. There are also those weird brands which sit in the middle, like AST and DEC, which I don't know what to say for because their products were a bit of a mixed bag. This is all going off of memory anyway as I have always preferred clones/compatibles to OEM boxes when possible. Probably why I like makers like Golding, because they used off-the-shelf components.