Weekend Open Forum: Your most regretted tech purchase?

The Tai-Chi is amazing! PM me and I'll take it off your hands for $200

On topic, most regrettable tech purchase was the iPhone 3g, what a piece of junk...

IOmega Jaz Drive horrrid little green POS and the 8 Micropolis 500meg SCSI 50pin HD's I had 5 months of animation saved to.. anyone who knows about Micropolis will understand my pain.

I would have to say my Denon LA-2150K Karaoke and Laserdisc player. It was a great product but a very short life span. As in Laserdisc itself was not around very long. I?m remembering it costing around $1,400 and then about a year later spending another $1,000 for a DVD player back in 97. At least the dvd format is still around.

Worst was a late 90's Acer CD burner, would coaster disks 75% of the time, guarantee failure if the screen saver came on or if you moved the mouse too quickly.

Second, LS120 Superdisk.

Mine? Buying a Sempron maybe. But I didn't really regret it, after seeing how my PC was still faster than my friends' Phenom X3. Haha.
What I really regret was not waiting for the Sandy Bridge. But still, that wouldn't hav made much difference, seeing the budget I was on.

My worst tech purchase was the Asus Transformer Prime. That tablet is an absolute disaster. Thankfully Amazon took it back, and fully refunded my money including the shipping. I took that money, and put it towards my best tech purchase in a long time, a Nikon D5100 kit, and some good glass to go with it.

For me, a slam dunk for worst tech purchase would have to be two(!) JVC S-VHS VCRs! OK, I used to sell JVC, was able to get it @ 1/2 price, bought a couple of pieces on employee purchase terms. Their stuff never seemed to meet spec, do what they claimed it would, or even last very long. I wound up selling every piece I bought in a month or so.

That said, I don't know why I though it would be different walking off the street as a "civilian" and buying these two turds. One broke in a couple of months. The other I simply stopped using, and went back to my Toshiba VCRs.

In my own defense I'd like to point out that DVD recorders, (free standing) were about a $1000,00 at the time.

My "second worst tech purchase", would be long and storied list, which would probably do me irreparable emotional harm by recanting it to you.

Zalman HD160 HTPC case. The airflow around the hard disks and expansion cards is woeful.

Bought a Packard Bell 386SX for $3000 in 1993, then a month later I spent $250 on a Sound Blaster card, then just a couple weeks after that my hard drive died and they refused to warranty it because I had opened the case to install the sound card, so I had to fork out another $250 for a 60MB hard drive.
That's also when I learned about proprietary systems that you couldn't upgrade easily. Went with clones after that and ever since for desktops.

Double dinger at a small office where I help out - Eight years ago they were using an Onstream USB30 30GB External USB tape drive which was starting to fail. Onstream was virtually dead, and they decided to try a brand new product, the Iomega REV35. The convenience it offered outweighed the $500 it cost. It was fast, compact, and came with simple backup software. It was a snap to set up, and easy for them to manage. Sadly, REV failed just outside of warranty and repair was more than the drive + 2 cartridges. They now have nice backup coverage with internal RAID and external hard drives hidden from burglars.

Let's just hope I'm not going to regret buying a Radeon HD 5550. I've put too much effort into reading reviews.

A LeadTek GeForce 5950 Ultra...I spent $550 dollars on it only to have it become obsolete 1 month later...FML

Microsoft Sidewinder X6 keyboard. It had some awesome ideas and features but the execution was just terrible. The slightly smaller than normal layout and placement of the Esc key was bad. And then there was the ghosting. My god, I would encounter the ghosting every single time I played CoD 4.

But I really loved the volume and lighting dials on it, and the removable numpad was pretty cool.

If they re-released an updated X6 with a standard layout and made the numpad wireless or had a cable from the main keyboard body to the numpad so you could sit it on your desk away from the main keyboard body I would buy it if my mind wasn't now set on something mechanical.

Apple iPad. First generation. Bought it for the hell of it. "used" it for about a week. For another year, it sat on top of my fridge waiting to be awoken just for Netflix while I was cooking. Finally sold it on craigslist. Only lost $200 on it. Not too bad.

Then again, most of my tech purchases are bad purchase simply because 90% of the time, it's something I absolutely do not need. Example: I have a desktop PC with an eyefinity setup, that I've invested over 3,500 dollars into... And 5 laptops. Asus G74, Asus G51vx, Samsung, Macbook and Macbook Air.

Sincerely,
Losing His Mind

Almost every android phone I've owned (amongst them Galaxy S/HTC Sensation) due to performance/stability issues; so if I didn't have a secondary smartphone I'd be feeling pretty ruined but thankfully I usually use my droids for work cell sim and can turn it off

I regret buying a Samsung 226BW monitor: over-saturated colors, poor viewing angles, crappy stand and backlight bleeding, and it wasn't very cheap either.

Replaced that with a Dell U2410.

To TS staff: would be cool to see next week-end's WOF about the best tech purchase made

Dual AMD Athlon MP's for a desktop system

apple ipad 2 two month ago