Weekend Open Forum: Your most regretted tech purchase?

I'm historically a bad person to follow with purchasing Windows OSes...

Windows ME and Windows Vista were my first two purchases of MS OSes, thankfully got it right 3rd time lucky with 7.
 
Ithryl said:
Dragon Age II - stupid combat system, boring characters (most of them), repeating zones (that weren't fun even for the first time)
Mafia II - worst purchase I ever made when it comes to games - stupid AI, half of the things that were supposed to be implement weren't, I could go on for quite a while
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Mafia did have quite stupid AI and some important features were missing, but never the less the game was still great! Dragon Age 2, more action paced I say but iv yet to actually play .. Not really interested though, DA1 was decent tho.
 
First was my first computer 486, bought it used from a friend. If I had waited a bit, I would get a Pentium 100 cheaply. Next was change from AMD K6-II 400Mhz to celeron 433, didn't notice a difference in performance but noticed a big hole in my wallet. Next was Geforce 2 Mx 400, the card itself was incredible in that times with my Athlon 1Ghz, but was quite pricey, again lesson learned, never buy the newest stuff. Would be better to wait few weeks. From then on I did a lot of upgrades and all was good but not radeon 9200SE which i fought would be better than 9000Pro, fortunately it was for my work PC, not for gaming. All later purchases I was extremely happy with. Like my radeon X1950 Pro which i bought cheaply with discount, now 560Ti again with discount. My Phenom II 955 and all 8 Gigs from G.Skill.
 
Easily it was my 1976 Chevy Monza as far as a piece of hardware. What a POS that car was! Next to that, while it ain't tech it was easily the worst thing I ever got . . . and that was my ex-wife herself!
 
I have many of those. Back in the days when I thought that numbers in gpu ram really matter, I bought a MSI gforce 4400mx 128bm version, replacing an old integrated VIA chipset, barely could run Doom 3. Other hardware that really pissed me off, was the AMD Phenom 9950, the worst $180 spent in my life, 4 cores for nothing. And last of all, an SLI of two 8600GT XXX Edition.
 
my most regretted purchase would be an i5 650 and supporting motherboard a month before the launch of sandy bridge!!! I bought the processor for the same price as an i5 2500k! Here in south africa we do have some shady pc suppliers!
 
My first computer, a TI 99, was the one I regretted buying the most. At the time it cost the equivalent of maybe a thousand dollars today and I was young and poor. Ram was the expensive component in those first computers because it had to be hand made and it had just 16k ram which was enough to learn basic, but not much else. The Commodore 64 had 64k ram and could play games and do all kinds of fancy things, but it also cost over 3 times as much. That is, it cost twice as much for the first two months I owned my TI 99 and then the price plummeted when the company started using an innovative way to produce ram significantly cheaper. I didn't stop kicking myself in the rear for a year.
 
My most regretted purchases are the gaming laptop Asus G1S and the case Cooler Master Cosmos 1000, the Asus G1S was equipped with a Geforce 8600M which couldn't play games well due to frequent overheat. The Cooler Master Cosmos 1000 is way too big and heavy and has a very bad airflow especially the HDD cage.
 
My most regretted purchase is Intel core i7 930 and asus sabertooth motherboard and another gigabyte motherboard. This combination was expensive but was never stable. I had boot up problems from day one.
 
Julio said:
Ha, you caught me there with HD-DVD, I still have that Xbox add-on laying around which serves no real purpose today. Another big and costly fail was a Sony 10" ultraportable that I loved at first, but a few weeks later and I regretted buying as it was too small for real productivity.

Other failed purchases: a couple of Palm PDAs that I barely used back in the day, and an iPhone 4 that took months until I could properly unlock and use. Add to this list numerous games that I bought on an impulse but never got around playing.
Click to expand...

I'll join you Julio, I have an HD-DVD drive for pc and a single HD-DVD movie "300". Must have thought that Sony were going to find themselves with another betamax with Blu-Ray. Got a Palm Pilot PDA that I bought to try and save myself from getting a mobile phone and failed. Belkin Nostromo N-50 speedpad gaming controller that couldn't support multiple keypresses for FPS (Ctrl, forward and reload keys etc.), and some other gaming controller/mini keyboard tool. Usually only a few impulse buys are regretted but the majority of tech stuff is well researched and actually needed. I've held off getting an ipad/tablet because we have a netbook for travel and I can do most "tablet" things on my smartphone. It's just a form factor of computing device that I don't require.
 
My worst pre-buy was Duke Nukem!!!

I'd probably ordered it months before and completely forgotten about it. The first I knew was when I had the 'your order has been dispatched' email.

As seems increasingly common nowadays, there were no reviews until after the release date!
 
Built a new computer based on the socket 1366 CPU some five or six months before the Sandy Bridge line debuted. D'oh! <facepalm>
 
Most of my regretted tech purchases come from me being cheap:

My first 2 computers I built using some POS Raidmax $30 cases that had crap for airflow and were poorly constructed. I only bought them because I thought the looked cool :p. One I still used in spare computer, but the other I was luckily able to sell to a friend and bought myself an Antec 300.

When I decided to finally get a "gaming" mouse I went really cheap and bought a Gigabyte one for about $25, which started tweeking out and moving by itself after about 6 months.

And several other items like HDD enclousers that broke after 5 months and things like that.

I'm usually too poor to jump on brand new tech or games and have to wait for them to go on sale or the price to drop, and by then there is a slew of reviews to tell me what to stay the hell away from. So being cheap and poor saves me some heartache, but also causes me to buy POS items, then turn around to buy quality items :p.

Sadly where I work invested heavily in Zip disk and drives, using them to back up data before DVD/CD tech or HDD tech improved. So we have a 1/2 file cabinet draw full of zip disk and about a dozen zip drives laying around :p.

Worst one my best friend ever did was about an Windows ME computer, and to make it worse the RAM stop being produced about a year after he got it (I believe it was made by Rambus), so then he couldn't even upgrade the thing and try for Windows XP on it :(.
 
iPhone 4s, that gimped OS and weak battery really had me begging for Android back!
 
Outside of defective and damaged tech I've bought over the years that most of the time I could get replaced my biggest duds purchase wise would be a ZIP drive and Nvidia Optimus in my laptop. The latter being my most recent purchase, and one I wish I looked into beforehand instead of blindly buying into it =/ .
 
Perhaps the IBM 75GXP "Deathstar" hard drives—I lost a lot of data on those... RAID 1 didn't help because the surviving drive failed before the volume was rebuilt! The class-action settlement eased a little of my pain.

A close second was the $300 SegaCD... I pawned my bedroom TV to buy one of those. That sucked.
 
Every big brand game I bought in 2011, all of them buggy bad console ports that I got bored with a month later. Better to buy lots of indie games for 7$ than one big piece of junk thats 60$!.

Also the 1366 chipset bull**** that got replaced in less than 6mnts. I just donated the whole thing to the church and bought a new pc.
 
My biggest regret was a PSU that was on offer from Maplin. Worked for a while but started cutting out. My second regret was buying an Epson ink jet printer. The printer worked fine but the cartridges cost a fortune.
 
Seikosha dot matrix printer ... loud Noisy slow and prone to blowing its own fuse if used for more than 20 pages. Plus to keep prices down it only had 1, yes 1, dot matrix. Seikosha 1000 I think they called it. Ink Ribbons were good tho.
Could barely keep a straight face when I sold it off,

Zip drives,Clik Drives and StringFloppy for Spectrum.
 
I had two 'Deathstars' fail within a month of each other. (A 40G and a 60G).

I didn't know about the class action but that just cheered me up!
 
my worst:
8 sticks of Corsair 2GB registered ECC DDR-667
very hot - never gets under t90°C
back in 2008 cost me over $1.2k and my heart still hurts :(
still works...
 
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