Weekend Open Forum: Your most regretted tech purchase?

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.

iphone 4, sold it after 3 months and bought the xperia play,

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

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 Think Geforce Series 7 was the last that was released with AGP and the only one I would want is so out of date and overpriced now that it isn't worth bothering with (the Geforce 7950GT or GeForce 7950 GX2).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.

: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

Acer netbook.

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.

A Notion Ink Tablet!

iPod touch, my gtx 470, because I could have bought a gtx 580 for the same price and have a quiet graphics card.

ipad 2...what a piece of crap. Luckily Apple store took it back after I complained.

Probably my first personal pc back in 96. My so called expert buddy went to Comp usa with my wife and she forked $1,800 on Pentium 166 Compaq Presario. It was good for Diablo but terrible for Tomb Raider. Like a poster above I purchased the Sony Cybershot 7.2 MP at Sears and it was expensive and completely it stunk in low light situations. I built my first pc in 98 and never looked back..

That thumbnail looked like something from star streak. Not sure though...

I regretted buying a pre-built HP before selling it and building my own PC. I then regretted not going with an i7-2600K in the first place. But I guess its a lesson learned to do tons of research before diving into anything, especially electronics. A bit of patience and research pays off.