2 x Logitech G5 mice... both died in under 2 years. They really should put a strain relief where the cable exits the mouse. Both of the mice failed in the same way, and that is some internal wire breakage there.

Logitech G-11 and G-15 keyboards... I hate rubber keys, they are quiet but lifespan sucks. Long live mechanical keyboards.

Logitech turned to hell, they used to make great stuff , but now it's cheap crap.

my MX series stuff still works fine...

Asus p3v4x to replace my broken asus p3b-f. What a piece of shit was the via based p3 motherboard 🙁

awergh wrote:

...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.

Why are you using Matrox G400 drivers from 1998? There are much newer drivers.

feipoa wrote:

awergh wrote:

...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.

Why are you using Matrox G400 drivers from 1998? There are much newer drivers.

I was meaning the drivers for windows 98. Not sure which year they were from I think I tried different ones but I would sometimes get an error on startup (cant remember what i keep thinking it was a segmentation fault but that doesnt seem right) and sometimes I wouldn't.

It worked great for nt4 apart from the fact it didn't seem to support directx so my dreams of 1600x600 Unreal Tournament were not realised.

RoyBatty wrote:

2 x Logitech G5 mice... both died in under 2 years. They really should put a strain relief where the cable exits the mouse. Both […]
Show full quote

2 x Logitech G5 mice... both died in under 2 years. They really should put a strain relief where the cable exits the mouse. Both of the mice failed in the same way, and that is some internal wire breakage there.

Logitech G-11 and G-15 keyboards... I hate rubber keys, they are quiet but lifespan sucks. Long live mechanical keyboards.

Logitech turned to hell, they used to make great stuff , but now it's cheap crap.

my MX series stuff still works fine...

About your G5 mice where they the first or the second model?
I have been using my G5 for 4-5 years and it still works just fine and a friend of mine had a G5 that he replaced a month ago due to the scroll wheel breaking after 5 years of intensive use.
Both where the second version.

I once bought an LCD projector with VCD resolution. It was acceptable for most console games and VHS video back then, but nothing more. Still my 1084s had a considerably better image.

leileilol wrote:

All Creative hardware that's not a CD-ROM drive.

Funny, the worst thing I ever got from Creative was a DVD drive. I got it bundled with an MPEG decoder card. The drive was blind after a few month. The decoder still works in an old PC as intended.

Only thing I regret ever buying was an Olympus Camedia C100 camera (not sure about the model though). Almost never used it and sold it a few years later for very little money.

I mostly regret what I did with/to my hardware (selling/destroying).

A Maxtor 2.1 gigabyte drive that died in six months. The replacement lasted about the same time. That was the last Maxtor drive I ever bought,.

Kinda wish I'd never bothered with anything k6-2

I started out as a Maxtor guy. I personally never had a Maxtor fail on me (until they bought Quantum and started slapping "Maxtor" on Quantum drives. My original 210mb Maxtor 7213AT drive still works!!! I mainly bought Maxtor drives because they were cheap (for their size) and reliable. They were certainly neither fast nor quiet though.

It seems every HDD company had their lemons. IBM and Quantum were generally great. The drives I generally hated were made by Western Digital, FuSHITsu and SamDUNG. Seagate made crap in the 90s too. Though modern Western Digital drives seem to be pretty decent however...

modern seagate drives are pretty shitty.... I won't buy another indefinitely
I had good luck with WD drives and IBMs... I had SamDUNGs fail on me, and I acquired dead FuSHITsu and ToSHITba drives in laptops

it's kind of funny that the worst companies in the world became part of seagate and the best became part of WD...
conner + quantum + maxtor + seagate + samsung = seagate
WD + hitachi = WD

🤣

I think Maxtors have a somewhat underservedly bad rep here, but I agree that at the moment WD is really up there in terms of quality.

Back to topic, playing the yearly upgrade strategy with regards to my main rigs. It's better to build cutting edge and use it for 4-5 years IMO than go low/ mid end and having to upgrade constantly. Sometimes "expert" advise from the tech sites isn't so expert.

i don't think i've had a failure on any drive i bought new - samsung, hitachi, maxtor, wd and seagate.

ratfink wrote:

i don't think i've had a failure on any drive i bought new - samsung, hitachi, maxtor, wd and seagate.

Same here. Even my Quantum 6.4GB drive I bought new with my Pentium 2 was still working when I replaced it with a 20GB Seagate drive (which also never failed, but was never used as much).

I did have 1 second hand drive fail on me. It was an IBM Deathstar 20gig drive.
One evening I shut down the computer it was in and all was fine. Then the next morning all it did was *clickclickclickclickclick* over and over again.
Shame though, it was really silent. Fortunately I had no precious data on that drive.

I had do WD BB series drives I bought after reading all the rave reviews - both were dead within a year. Last WD drives I ever bought.

I have outfitted nearly every computer I have with ST340016A drives - in some cases two drives - some are approaching 10-12 years old and all are still going strong.

I disagree with some earlier comments about Conner - they made good drives, but didn't keep up and fell behind technologically

The only piece of hardware I can regret purchasing is probably the TTGI 520W PSU I got off ebay a month or so ago. And only because it was DOA with bulging and vented caps. Can't really blame the company or design of the unit, it was manufactured during the cap plague era. Got a refund on it and got to keep the unit, I bet it'll be good to go with a recapping.

On the other thread going here, I can't remember ever having had any hard drive fail on me, at least on their own. Even the old Maxtor 40GB I had in my P4 rig was solid up right up until I retired it in 2008.

Ah, hard drive brand snobbery. One of the more pointless arguments in computing.

I've had HDDs fail from every single brand. The only brands I'd "never buy again" are the ones that don't exist any more.

Spea Media FX. Fell for their marketing line of it being MT-32 compatible. Also had issues with Sound Blaster compatible and no FM chip (wavetable substitution). Horrible product.

I managed to avoid the whole zip-drive thing....jumped into CD-R almost right from that start

Several people mention ZIP drives, but it is still a very convenient way to transfer files between anything from an MS-DOS PC up to Windows 7/8..... I bought myself a second hand USB ZIP drive last year and I have a lot of ATAPI ZIP drives, which come in quite handy. I also have a big stack of ZIP disks, so I do not really care if one fails.

I have also bought hardware that I later wished I wouldn't have.... A few ISA soundcards that claimed to be SB Pro compatible, but really were not.