Weekend Open Forum: Your most regretted tech purchase?

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.
 
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.
 
ranger1st said:
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.

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.
 
A Thermaltake Thoughpower PSU that thing was way worse than my first purchased low-priced PSU unit, worst rails & ripple & noise per voltages from a high priced PSU you could find.
Thermaltake PSU's = Junk
 
Purchasing the Asus P5N-T Deluxe Motherboard. The thing bluescreened constantly.
 
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.

8800GTS? I had the 320 one which was actually pretty good on my 1680x1050 monitor.
 
From iFail series :) an iPhone 4S and iPad 2, good thing that I've found a brain washed Apple fan to which I had sell them afterwards :)), they were just a waste of money, no wonder why Apple is making hundreds of billions, selling trashy products at astronomical prices sure gets you billions. lol
 
SNGX1275 said:

8800GTS? I had the 320 one which was actually pretty good on my 1680x1050 monitor.

Not sure if that card was ever released on AGP. Think Geforce Series 7 was the last that was released with AGP and the only one I would want is so out of date and overpriced now that it isn't worth bothering with (the Geforce 7950GT or GeForce 7950 GX2). I had Windows XP and the AGP card when I bought the motherboard and I thought it made sense. What I didn't know was that the route to use Vista or Windows 7 when they came out would involve losing my ATI graphics card as Nvidia had moved on from NForce3 and left the ATI cards out in the cold with future operating systems. ATI continued to release the occasional AGP card (there was definately a 4xxx series AGP card) but my 1950pro could have happily powered Vista for a bit.

In the end I bought a Studio XPS from Dell with a i7 920 in it, definately haven't looked back. Great PC. Upgraded to a 460GTX recently and playing Skyrim on some tasty settings.

Just chose a bad upgrade path with the Nforce AGP mobo anyway. When I consider how much stuff I have purchased, I am not too bothered as I have been happy with everything else.
 
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

:O The Sidewinder X8 is on the other extreme for me, best tech purchase I've ever made! I absolutely love it, had it for 3 over years now with zero problems.

Such a shame that MS discontinued the Sidewinder line of peripherals. If/when my X8 dies I'm hunting down another X8 to replace it with unless someone else releases a mouse with vertical thumb buttons....
 
Quote:
"-$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. "

This sound card with front-end combo is great! I have owned it for 6 years and it's still working very well. Optical Fiber, rca, midi, 5.25mm input and output VERY handy for plugging in synth keyboards, surround sound units, high-grade headphones, etc.
You must have had a mid or lower size case of putting the front-end hindered airflow. My cpu has always stayed around 45-55 with the panel on and I have an NZXT Guardian full ATX.

Quote:
"Voodoo 5.
3DFX went out of business soon after launch. No further driver support, or developer support. Great hardware that nothing took advantage of.
If I remember correct, it was at least $300. The performance that would buy today.... "

Are you on crack?
3DFX ruled the graphics world for years. I remember them making video cards around the time of Doom. They were one of the (possibly THE) first to allow you to daisy-chain 2 cards together via a ribbon cable (first incarnation of SLI/Xfire).
Any one else here remember how friggin great Quake 2 ran on GLIDE?

Surprisingly I have had little regrettable purchases, I usually do wayyyy more than nescessary research on something before purchasing it. But no one is immune......

-Windows Millenium (ONLY SINGULAR THING that was good in that OS was the introduction of System Restore)
-Windows Vista x86+x64 combo the day it released (PLUS Paid the extra $15 and ordered the x86 cd install set)
Lesson Learned: Get every 2nd Microsoft OS (Win95v2, Win98SE, XP, 7)

-Socket 939 Athlon64 then 4 months later Socket AM2 came out with the dual-core FX cpu's -_-*
-Early adopter of Blackberry Torch 9800 (can't multi-task at all, at least the 9830 can)
Lesson Learned: ALWAYS get the 2nd hardware version (revision 1 or 2)

-Impulse-buying of a few under $20 games I've played little (Red Dead Redemption, HAWX2), or have known glitches in them *cough*MLB2K9*cough*
-An RCA discman (huge, heavy, HORRIBLE quality sound, went back to Sony and haven't stopped since, f*** iCrap)
-ANY type of audio cable attached to 2 ends from Radio Shack [The Source]. Audio patch, extention, dongle splitter, etc, NEXXTECH = S***TECH. If you get one of those types of items from there, GET THE WARRANTY. I bought the $5 warranty on my 12' 3.5 audio extention cable and have exchanged it roughly 7 times since purchase (February 2010)

Probably more but taking too long to try to remember them
 
It is kinda funny; now that I have bought and acquired Apple products I can honestly say that I hate every singe mishap that they turned out to be.

I regret every single purchase of overpriced rotten fruit.
 
bought iphone 3GS which is not factory unlocked.. so I'm having trouble when travel overseas :D
 
regret would be too strong, but I'm certainly not too thrilled with my second 6950 - there were only half a dozen games I couldn't comfortably (~45fps) max @1080p before, so I just keep asking why did I buy it?
 
Bought a MESH computer a few years, the spec in the booklet did not match the spec on the company database and we ended up with a machine with half the RAM, no floppy drive (we had a lot of backed up work of floppy disks), a cd drive which didn't run dvds, and a trial of office (in the booklet it said office was installed AND included a product key.
We phoned up the day we received it and they said we should have checked with the person we ordered from when we phoned to order as the booklet was printed with mistakes, however we had still paid the same price as in the booklet so we then had to pay for the extra RAM and dvd drive later.
 
When I built my first computer, I got a motherboard made by Mach Speed. It ended up giving out twice before I upgraded. Fortunately, they had a lifetime warranty, which they honored both times it broke.
 
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