I have a few that I greatly dislike, in no particular order (warning: long wall of text inbound, it's 11PM where I live as I'm writing this 😂 so please excuse any typos)
- When you buy a system and find out it needs parts that are hard to find and/or expensive (hello 128MB FPM/EDO 5V DIMMs)
- Proprietary parts, 'nuff said. Combine that with #1 and you got the very culmination of "Ouch, my wallet!" or if the part is practically unobtainium and actively necessary: "Darn... I really looked forward to use this... Guess that's another project for later."
- Cable management... I already struggle with normal cables, but with ribbon cables, this becomes a exercise in patience and frustration.
Now for the dreaded things:
- Brittle plastics, as someone who owns two old Macs with the most brittle plastic that Apple could get their hands on (iMac G3 and Power Macintosh 7500/100), this is something I dread a lot. And I really mean it. Imagine you're trying to take apart a case to clean the chassis throughly and then *SNAP!* a tab holding the front panel snapped off, and then another, and another... (speaking from experience, I broke a front tab on my Lian-Li PC-7Plus...)
- CPU jumpers, when I swapped my Pentium PC's P133 for a P233, I had to triple, no, quadruple check if I had misconfigured a jumper, just the thought of setting a voltage jumper the wrong way and blowing something up... (look at the end of my post for a little debacle that I had with said system...)
- In a lesser vein, IRQ jumpers... I was born way after PnP became the main standard, and to me IRQ/DMA/Address jumpers are still somewhat arcane to me, finding which IRQ is taken and which ones are free... I never did it, but I know it's going to take me a loooong while to learn how all that stuff works *looks nervously at the CT1350B that sits on my shelf as I don't have a system to put it in*
- CPUs with exposed dies, especially Socket A CPUs, just the thought of cracking the die trying to put the heatsink on.... That's enough to make me shudder just by thinking about it. Oh and speaking of heatsinks...
- ...CPU heatsinks that clip on the socket... Pretty much all I have to say about them... I'm always worried of cracking a die or when removing the clip, having to resort to use a screwdriver to lift the tab, in fear that the screwdriver slips and severs a few traces.
About the "P233 jumper debacle"
Oh and just for fun, I did find out I got a jumper wrong, one that raised the vcore voltage slightly enough to cause my P233 to act iffy (RAM corruptions, constant SCANREG when I booted up Win98, and when trying to reinstall Windows for the nth time getting slapped with SUWIN errors), wheras my P133 shrugged off that extra voltage... I laugh about it but it did send me onto a wild goose chase that had me stumped for a year and a half! LOL anyways, that's when I saw a post (I forgot who sent that... Alas) mentioning that P54 chips can take a bit more voltage than they're rated at without much trouble.. That's what lead me to reskim over the manual for my Shuttle board and found out about a jumper that when open would raise the CPU core voltage, and upon closing it, voilà! It booted just fine!! Sorry, I got a bit carried away on this one but I felt like explaining why. haha
Proud owner of a Shuttle HOT-555A 430VX motherboard and two wonderful retro laptops, namely a Compaq Armada 1700 [nonfunctional] and a HP Omnibook XE3-GC [fully working :p]