Anything Apple..

Was given one of those all-in-one Macs by one of my clients, i5 with 8GB RAM. Tossed the HDD, Apple keyboard and mouse. Installed an SSD and installed Windows 10 on it. My wife uses it for her side hustle business.

Probably one of those RGB gaming chairs with built-in speakers. Looked cool at first, but I can’t imagine actually using one without feeling ridiculous. Also, anything with "gamer" branding that costs double for no real reason.

Dan Solo wrote on 2025-03-27, 13:55:

Probably one of those RGB gaming chairs with built-in speakers. Looked cool at first, but I can’t imagine actually using one without feeling ridiculous. Also, anything with "gamer" branding that costs double for no real reason.

ah yes, gamer headphones, gamer mouse, gamer etc - it all feels like the kind of stuff relatives feel they should buy for their sons/nephews/cousins in a marketing led artificial belonging to a "gamer community"

the products themselves are usually nothing special, and the chairs in particular are kind of awful. Still, some may have used them and actually found them great, they sell well enough

IBM Deskstar hard drives.

People started calling them "Death stars" for a reason. 💀

According to Wikipedia, it was only the 75GXP series that had the infamously high failure rates. But that was enough to kill IBM's reputation on the computer storage market.

digger wrote on 2025-03-28, 10:59:

IBM Deskstar hard drives.

People started calling them "Death stars" for a reason. 💀

According to Wikipedia, it was only the 75GXP series that had the infamously high failure rates. But that was enough to kill IBM's reputation on the computer storage market.

I had a Western Digital rebranded or OEMed 22GXP that died early, suddenly and without apparent external cause. I have not had a drive fail on me like that since, AFAICR, including some later IBM models (later Hitachi) which all worked well. Glad I never got a 75GXP, though.

RGB peripherals and hardware. Imagine paying an extra 20 to 50 dollars (clearly over that for a motherboard) for something that adds no functionality and to top it up, rather makes your pc look either like a toy or a brothel.

digger wrote on 2025-03-28, 10:59:

IBM Deskstar hard drives.

People started calling them "Death stars" for a reason. 💀

According to Wikipedia, it was only the 75GXP series that had the infamously high failure rates. But that was enough to kill IBM's reputation on the computer storage market.

I had a 75GXP and it was perfectly fine... I always bought IBM drives before and after the story broke, then Hitachi when they bought up the division. I only switched back to WD when they bought Hitachi and killed the brand.

The only drive I've ever had die completely (as in fine one day, dead the next at boot up) was a WD... lost me a shed load of irreplaceable source code but taught me a valuable lesson in backing up - fortunately I did have some backups, but not of everything.

digger wrote on 2025-03-28, 10:59:

IBM Deskstar hard drives.

People started calling them "Death stars" for a reason. 💀

According to Wikipedia, it was only the 75GXP series that had the infamously high failure rates. But that was enough to kill IBM's reputation on the computer storage market.

Funnily enough, when it comes to hard drives and storage devices, I have had exceptionally good luck. And also many drives tend to start working again the second I touch them. I’ve only had like 3 storage devices fail on me, that I remember. One of them was an SD card. Then the drive my laptop from 2019 came with, and lastly, a 40 MB drive in a Mac Classic I no longer own. Other than that? Smooth sailing. Even old SCSI drives (besides that one mac) have never failed on me. I must have a superpower. Even the old Death Star drives tend to just work again when I touch them…

As for hardware I’m glad I never bought? Well, in 2022 I upgraded my GPU from a 2080. I was going to get a 2080 Ti or 3080 something, but I opted for a 6800 XT instead. That was definitely the right call, haha. I of course desire more performance, but I can be happy with this for a long while. I’m glad I didn’t upgrade from my 6800 XT either, cuz expensive stuff has happened since then that I wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise.

subhuman@xgtx wrote on 2025-03-28, 13:12:

RGB peripherals and hardware. Imagine paying an extra 20 to 50 dollars (clearly over that for a motherboard) for something that adds no functionality and to top it up, rather makes your pc look either like a toy or a brothel.

Why not both? Feeling sudden inspo to make a rainbow puke RGB system with a barbie stripper pole in it plus (in)appropriate doll.

Dan Solo wrote on 2025-03-27, 13:55:

Probably one of those RGB gaming chairs with built-in speakers.

Even the non-RGB gaming chairs are the least ergonomic chairs you can buy. They've actually caused back problems, and the random block of foam for a "lumbar support" and cheesy pillow for a headrest only make things worse.

Also, they're all made in the same factory with the same materials, no matter what brand they have on them or how much they cost.

I'm personally more frustrated at the lack of hardware without RGB than glad I didn't buy any.

digger wrote on 2025-03-28, 10:59:

IBM Deskstar hard drives.

What's weird is that almost all of the hard drives I've had fail were Toshiba drives. I've seen every brand fail, but I've only seen three Toshiba drives last longer than two years (which was coincidentally their warranty period). One of those was a 3.5" drive (former Hitachi, so it might count as a Deathstar) that failed after five years by failing to spin back up after a power cycle. I saw tons of failed Toshiba 2.5" drives, and they almost all failed by suddenly developing thousands of bad sectors and making Windows switch to PIO mode. Part of that could be caused by handling, but some of those were my own drives or in laptops that were never moved while powered on (lots of laptops are treated as desktops). One of the Toshiba drives I bought (factory-installed drive in a laptop) had a head crash while sitting stationary on my desk as I was studying for a test in college.

I bought one Toshiba external HDD in late 2019. That was before I was aware of their reputation. Still works so far, but, it's only plugged to computer every once in a while.

I have to agree with others on the so called "gaming" chairs. I've never bought one for myself, and I never will.

My daughter wanted one a few years back, so we got her what was supposed to be one of the better ones on the market at the time, it didn't last a year. Got her a second one, we couldn't talk her out of it, even better model, it made it about a year and a half. Parts started breaking, cushions started coming apart, and neither of them seemed to be all that comfortable for long periods of sitting. There was nothing there to justify the asking prices. They are all marketing and no real function.

My wife bought a really nice executive style high-backed office chair, it didn't cost much more than the gaming chairs we got our daughter, and it's lightyears beyond in every respect. Comfort, durability, adjustability, etc. So, after the second gaming chair was hauled out, we got her the same one my wife has, and she's much happier.

The bottom line is they are all made to offer form over function, and from the known brands to the unknown, many are made in the same way, with the same materials and parts, and often in the same factories, and simply sold under many different names.

Heck, my Serta fabric office chair I got from Wal-Mart 2 years ago for under $100 is still going strong and looks great.

So yeah, the gaming chair craze... in this old geeks opinion... not worth it. 😀

StriderTR wrote on 2025-03-30, 20:11:

My wife bought a really nice executive style high-backed office chair, it didn't cost much more than the gaming chairs we got ou […]
Show full quote

My wife bought a really nice executive style high-backed office chair, it didn't cost much more than the gaming chairs we got our daughter, and it's lightyears beyond in every respect. Comfort, durability, adjustability, etc. So, after the second gaming chair was hauled out, we got her the same one my wife has, and she's much happier.

The bottom line is they are all made to offer form over function, and from the known brands to the unknown, many are made in the same way, with the same materials and parts, and often in the same factories, and simply sold under many different names.

Heck, my Serta fabric office chair I got from Wal-Mart 2 years ago for under $100 is still going strong and looks great.

So yeah, the gaming chair craze... in this old geeks opinion... not worth it. 😀

a good quality regular 'office' chair is the way to go i agree

as a rule anything that tries too hard to be 'cool', that tries to suggest some kind of belonging to a suspiciously marketing/inauthentic seeming 'scene' or 'community' and to appeal to younger people. I get the appeal and i think we all have to accept some losses and lessons learnt - with kids we really see the torrential waterfall of marketing (direct and indirectly through peers) that assault their innocent and easily swayed minds even as it tries the same with us

i remember adverts when they were more about "product x has features a,b,c and they work really well", with a bit of celeb endorsement and emotion/narrative even humor. Now the product being advertised is background to some awful narrative that tries to circumvent your thinking mind and trigger you subconscious needs on social status, belonging, self-worth or somesuch; Fast food is about connecting with your kids or being a cool metropolitan young generation member, driving is empowering or something while saving the earth and diet soda and gaming is all about rock climbing and demographically cool communities or something.... PC tech adverts i don't see so often now, but generally it seems to just be some music and some talking heads alluding to how creative or 'businessy' they are due to some new laptop

gerry wrote on 2025-03-31, 10:23:

StriderTR wrote on 2025-03-30, 20:11:

My wife bought a really nice executive style high-backed office chair, it didn't cost much more than the gaming chairs we got ou […]
Show full quote

My wife bought a really nice executive style high-backed office chair, it didn't cost much more than the gaming chairs we got our daughter, and it's lightyears beyond in every respect. Comfort, durability, adjustability, etc. So, after the second gaming chair was hauled out, we got her the same one my wife has, and she's much happier.

The bottom line is they are all made to offer form over function, and from the known brands to the unknown, many are made in the same way, with the same materials and parts, and often in the same factories, and simply sold under many different names.

Heck, my Serta fabric office chair I got from Wal-Mart 2 years ago for under $100 is still going strong and looks great.

So yeah, the gaming chair craze... in this old geeks opinion... not worth it. 😀

as a rule anything that tries too hard to be 'cool', that tries to suggest some kind of belonging to a suspiciously marketing/inauthentic seeming 'scene' or 'community' and to appeal to younger people. I get the appeal and i think we all have to accept some losses and lessons learnt - with kids we really see the torrential waterfall of marketing (direct and indirectly through peers) that assault their innocent and easily swayed minds even as it tries the same with us

Another example of that, was that although there were early enthusiast designed and made water cooling parts, by Swiftech, DangerDen etc, the first couple of rounds of "brand name" complete watercooling solutions/kits were all cosmetics no performance, then those inspired some 3rd tier cheapy ones that weren't even as good as stock heatsinks.

StriderTR wrote on 2025-03-26, 16:45:

- Apple Computers...

Same here.
Too expensive and too limited/closed up.
This is the same reason I hate modern phones and don't really care what I get, since I barely use it... but that's a different topic.

gerry wrote on 2025-03-28, 10:52:

ah yes, gamer headphones, gamer mouse, gamer etc

Agreed.
Most gamer gear is quite terrible.
I got a pair of Steelseries wireless headphones for free (from Craigslist) because they were broken - one driver just went open-circuit randomly and that was that. Original owner told me they were just weeks past the warranty and SteelSeries literally told him "not my problem anymor".
From what I could hear from the other (working driver) side, I can't say these are worth the price tag - battery is huge but doesn't really last, the frequency response is... meh... and overall, Senheiser and many others offer superior performance and quality at lower prices.
So I take a hard pass on anything labeled "gamer" or "gaming".

In regards to office chairs, I got my first "nice" office chair off of Craigslist for free over a decade ago - a high-back "executive" type office chair. The metal base had a crack in it... which wasn't too much of an issue with me, since I'm a pretty light guy. A few rungs of steel wire secured it well enough, and it's still holding up. Even the fake / pleather covering is still OK... though probably worth mentioning that I do use it with a throw cover on top (I don't like leather or pleather, because they feel cold in the winter and sweaty in the summer.) Apart from that, it's very comfortable and can sit on it all day without getting back pain. Even now, after 10 years of use, it's still pretty comfortable, despite the bottom cushion not being in top shape anymore (to say the least - it's sunk in the middle quite a bit.)

subhuman@xgtx wrote on 2025-03-28, 13:12:

RGB peripherals and hardware. Imagine paying an extra 20 to 50 dollars (clearly over that for a motherboard) for something that adds no functionality and to top it up, rather makes your pc look either like a toy or a brothel.

Yup, I too have a strong dislike for just about anything RGB. "Rainbow barf", as some call it, is the more accurate term, IMO.

digger wrote on 2025-03-28, 10:59:

IBM Deskstar hard drives.

People started calling them "Death stars" for a reason. 💀

According to Wikipedia, it was only the 75GXP series that had the infamously high failure rates. But that was enough to kill IBM's reputation on the computer storage market.

Yes, the 75GXP series were supposed to be the most problematic ones, but even some of their other series were also somewhat affected. That said, I find it ironic how often people mention these drives as failure-prone, yet there's not as much noise about certain other manufacturers and series that were also known to have lots of problems (e.g. WD "Green" series, WD800xx series, Seagate 7200.12, and etc.) FWIW, I've had far more problems with Western Digital drives just randomly diying one day when they worked fine and had normal SMART readings the previous day - most of them just doing the "click of death", and two with dead motor controllers. At least with Seagate, the most problematic ones just developed bad sectors and became too slow, but still allowed me to back them up.

lti wrote on 2025-03-30, 18:57:

What's weird is that almost all of the hard drives I've had fail were Toshiba drives. I've seen every brand fail, but I've only seen three Toshiba drives last longer than two years (which was coincidentally their warranty period). One of those was a 3.5" drive (former Hitachi, so it might count as a Deathstar) that failed after five years by failing to spin back up after a power cycle. I saw tons of failed Toshiba 2.5" drives, and they almost all failed by suddenly developing thousands of bad sectors and making Windows switch to PIO mode. Part of that could be caused by handling, but some of those were my own drives or in laptops that were never moved while powered on (lots of laptops are treated as desktops). One of the Toshiba drives I bought (factory-installed drive in a laptop) had a head crash while sitting stationary on my desk as I was studying for a test in college.

Early Toshiba HDDs were indeed absolutely awful, especially the 2.5" drives. FWIW, many PS3 consoles used these, and I can't tell you how many I have seen failed. These ranged anywhere from 80 to 320 GB capacities. BUT... it seems that Toshiba recovered from this, eventually. At one of my workplaces, a toll road, many of the toll controllers (custom mini industrial PCs) used Toshiba 320 GB 2.5" HDDs, and I didn't see a single failure from these. I even got a few for myself (from retired equipment that was destined for scrap), including the one in the laptop I'm typing from right now, and so far all have been rock-solid (knock on wood.) But the older ones that failed were exactly like lti described - just started developing bad sectors everywhere and eventually died. I only managed to "save" one by seeing where the bad sectors are (with a surface scan) and then mapped them out into their own separate partitions. The drive ended up with 5 partitions total - 3 good and 2 bad in between them. Works well enough for occasional backups (or rather 2nd backups), ironically.

Glad I didn't: P4 Celeron, my employer let me borrow the computer upgrade kit and play with it, gave it back, at this time, I was on athlon computer.

Computer parts that are consumer level and overclocker's parts are overratted. I only buy HP workstations and high end workstation notebook. Before that, I had Dell Optiplex 860, it had issues.

Cheers,

The Intel 80387-math coprocessor. I had a 386sx at 16 MHz. The poor thing sat between a fully fledged 386DX and a 286 in performance - and I wanted to squeeze everything out of it. I'm happy the option to get the coprocessor never came, because I would have probably bought one thinking it would revolutionize what that system could do. More RAM and a bigger (and faster HDD) were the things that made most sense in it.

orcish75 wrote on 2025-03-27, 11:49:

Anything Apple..

Ditto. I recently obtained a MacBook Pro from a relative; besides the 2560×1600 resolution, the machine's nothing to write home about.

- Any Creative SoundBlaster product after the X-Fi series. I don't know how they manage to stick around. What niche do they even fill nowadays?
- Bigfoot Killer NICs were the best... at separating PC gamers from their money.
- Dedicated PhysX cards.
- Nvidia GeForce FX cards
- Laptops with Nvidia GPUs around the late 00s to early 10s. Heard a lot of those were dropping like flies just a few months after they were built.
- HD-DVDs and HD-DVD players. Even back before Blu-ray "won" the format wars I knew that was going to flop just from the awkward name alone.
- Microsoft Kinect
- Microsoft SPOT watches
- Microsoft Zune
- That Microsoft portable media center thingamabob that was featured on TechTangents' channel a couple years ago.
- any PPC Mac that came out a year before Apple switched to Intel
- any Yonah based Intel Mac
- Ouya. I feel bad for anyone that bought that console or funded its Kickstarter.

GulchWinder3D wrote on 2025-04-03, 18:46:

- Any Creative SoundBlaster product after the X-Fi series. I don't know how they manage to stick around. What niche do they even fill nowadays?
- Bigfoot Killer NICs were the best... at separating PC gamers from their money.

*snip*

For sound cards, basically for people who want to run higher ohm headphones. Sure, you can get a separate amp, but there is some convenience having it on one card. Also line in and out is useful for other things, again for convenience sake. I know a guy at work who has an AE-5, this is what he uses it for.

As for the Killer NICs, yeah. I never bought into that either, and everyone I know who had one had problems with them. I vaguely remember giving a few said people some IBM EtherJet controllers on an adapter card, being told it was night and day. Maybe misremembering something though.

And on that topic, I got one more thing I’m glad I pushed my family not to buy: Belkin WiFi routers. In the late 00s to 10s, they were always breaking or being crap for one reason or another. Fixing said issues were actually how I earned my first few bucks! When it came time for my family to get our first, I made damn sure to steer them clear of Belkin, and got one of those classic blue Linksys routers instead. And guess what, that thing still works, like the day we bought it. It’s floating around my mom’s place somewhere, I used it as a wireless bridge for my server for a while as recently as 2022 I believe.