Weekend Open Forum: Your most regretted tech purchase?

Really Matt, if you had seen my draft for the mod I told you about at the time you bought that case, you surely wouldn't have bought it. Antec-like performance for $32!

N97 Worst Let down ever... Fake pub made me choose the N97 over the omnia HD. I would have chosen. Now I'm happy with my Droid SGSII.

8800 Ultra upon release, 799usd, nuff said.

Bought 2x512 MB RAM for an old ThinkPad X30. Both expensive (100 USD) and incompatible! Also, the Cooler Master Sileo 500. Poor construction quality, it cut my finger during the built. Not worth the money.

Ditto on the ZIP drive. Should have realized that the name told it all...

Hitachi 1TB HDD, RMAed 2 weeks ago and still no reply. Had it for few months ...

Anything made by HP (a cd burner, digital camera and two printers), everything broke down a week after warranty expired.

Anything made by Apple. My iPod has been replaced twice, and can no longer be charged through USB. It truly is crapware. OSX in any form is an incompatibility nightmare.

Buying high end CPUs is ridiculous; now they are outshone by Celerons. Future proofing computers in general sounds like a joke. I have flushed money down the drain buying high end components in general.

In the future I will buy the components I find adequate at the time and that are the most power efficient.

The case and power supply are ironically the most enduring investments. A beautiful case could remain beautiful. Old outdated components are foul more often than not.

Regret buying a Avermedia t.v. tuner very difficult to get it working also placed very close to the gpu blocking its fan.Hence a waste of money.

Manufacturers usually calculate the average time their products run without a hitch, and set that as a warranty period. That way, they know that if anything breaks down, it'll be after the warranty expires, and so they won't be bothered. Money saving policy, you see?
I mean, they can't be that helpful now, can they?

Paid £40 for a graphic tablet once (I think that's what it was called at the time): One of those big pads with a pen that graphic designers use. Problem for me though was it was just a cheap-*** thing and gave me nothing but BSODs and headaches.

Returned it after 2 week. Worst thing I've ever bought for its money.

This list is long and distinguished. Can't even remember all of them as it is too painful.
-Zip drive and 10 Zip disks.
-DVD writer non-dual layer
-Budget Socket 754 system build with a mobile single core CPU - It rocked for about 27 days. Was stuck with that system for 2 years.
-Over paying for at least 2 video cards like the user above when I could have gone budget and upgraded on a quicker cycle.
-PITA raid instead of fast single hard drive like a raptor or an ssd.
-Almost every motherboard I paid premium for so I could "upgrade" when the time came and then I never did once - but hey I always had that possibility. I tend to build new every 2-3 years.
-Parallel port anything, like printers and scanners back in the day after usb had made an appearance. But they were a good deal!
-SCSI card and actually SCSI anything - It was great for about 6 months but then it cost just too much for hard drives and such.
-$200 pci SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum Fatality with live drive - Could have just got regular SB card instead of that stupid large ribbon cable that attached the card to the front drive and that killed airflow in my case to the point that I removed the live drive part. Could have gotten the Sound card alone on sale for $78. Replaced not to far down the line with a PCI Express model.

The list goes on and on for 30 years.

HD-DVD definately...

I've had a few but the most recent is signing up for Amazon Prime. It's a great service, but since I'm not in the US I can't take full advantage of it. I signed up for the 30-day free trial to quickly send something over to my cousin's place in FL and was supposed to cancel it right away, but it just slipped my mind.

I also regretted getting a waterproof camera from Casio a couple of years back, the Exilim EX-G1. I was going on a trip and being able to take underwater pictures sounded like fun, but the quality was really awful for everything else. Apart from that a few games and mobile apps that I bought on an impulse but never got around playing/using.

That is an easy question: my Toshiba Satellite C660-108:
- starts with terrible design (2 usb ports too close to each other, VGA connector on the side close to front, only 2 LED indicators for power on/off and active/suspended, etc)
- continues with poor battery, starting to fail to fully load after 2 months of low usage.
- finishes with a keyboard controller bug which slows downs the keyboard or makes it retype random parts of text that you typed a few minutes ago, bug that was not fixed by latest BIOS update.

Terrible product. It's out of production now, but avoid it's succesors.

Green? I never saw a green Jazz. And Micropolis was among the most reliable brands of the 90's. We did have a 2gb SCSI die on us after a couple years, and they replaced it happily. That one lasted another decade.

Probably the Iomega zip drive. When I got it, it was a blessing...but CD's pretty much killed em. I still have 2 boxes full of zip disks.

A Xonar DX (Not at all required on ASUS Deluxe v2)
and a Microsoft sidewinder X8 mouse : faulty 1st mouse and charging torture with replaced 2nd mouse

What a waste of money for both around 8000 INR

My most regretted tech purchase was upgrading my CPU from an AMD Phenom x4 9950 to a AMD Phenom II x4 940. The performance increase was minuscule compared to the money I spent on it.

MSI Nforce 3 motherboard that meant I could use my AGP ATI 1950pro graphics card and put my AMD 6400 CPU in it. Problem was that you can't upgrade it to Windows Vista or further without putting an Nvidia GPU in it which renders it close to useless for me - when did Nvidia last bring out a decent AGP card? Should have gone for a PCI express motherboard alot earlier but that PC is still sitting around and without buying a new mobo or a nvidia gpu then it can't be upgraded to anything useful. One day ill just bin it to save space.