Weekend Open Forum: Your most regretted tech purchase?

What? No mention of the iPad 3 on Friday's Techspot when it went on sale that day? That said, my worst tech thing was a Macbook Pro. Luckily Frys took it back for a full refund. It was fine until I ran updates. Then, it got at least 8 things wrong with it, and I can remember 4. Of course, it didn't run windows programs, as expected. It didn't work with wireless n. Firefox crashed on the simplest sites. It didn't scroll. I don't remember the other 4. Their forums listed various people with these problems. For such an expensive machine, it should be nearly perfect, like my Toshiba laptop.

I bought a Samsung Galaxy S II 4G and a few weeks later the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket 4G LTE came out.

I hate Macs with a passion. My father bought one for $3000 back in 97. It was the biggest piece of garbage to ever exist on this earth. The price is completely unfathomable.

Sadly, I recently replace my Tai Chi case for a Silverstone case and it is now collecting dust.

iPod Touch 4th Gen 32GB - Useful device and much faster than previous models, but definitely not worth $300.

AMD Radeon video cards 4000 & 5000 series, everything from XFX to Gigabyte. All were failures in terms of drivers, fan noise and general reliability (RAM failures, capacitors).

After switching back to nVidia I haven't looked back.

Buying a 1st generation Asus EEE;
Part solid state HD, part SATA.
Keyboard quit after two weeks.

PATA drives.
I have 4 500 gig PATA drives lying around. New motherboards don't support and anyone chasing PATA drives can't use because of the 120 gig limit.
Burnt.

Celeron WIilamette, definitely. Pucharsed long long time ago together with low end motherboard, as a kid. Could buy KT333 mobo with Duron 1,3 for even bit lower price, and has mobo proper even for hi end K7 cpu's like Barton mobile upgrade.

Biggest regret: Pr-ordering Crysis 2. I would quote the appropriate line from 'Henry V' if I knew it, something about poisoning the very element of trust. I haven't made a pre-order since, and don't plan to.

My Zune HD ahahah

I even preordered it because I was so excited.

3x 8800 Ultras for $750 each to run Crysis. Man, nothing could run that game. What a waste that was. I learned my lesson though. What? Those 580 Classy Ultras in my rig? You see, what had happened was...

2 things:
- pre built Atom/ion HTPC. it was just too limited. e.g. you were able to play 1080p but just with media player classic, vlc didn't work. After approx. 1 year it was too much pain in the a** to always make sure, that you don't put too much load on it.

- For my first PC build I bought a incredible expensive Ati (AMD?) 4870X2. Not gonna buy another CF or SLI setup anymore, you just end up waiting longer for dirvers and having more problems in general.

Symantec Altiris 7.1. Thankfully they let me downgrade to version 6.9

Nintendo Wii... bought it, moded it and never touched it again....

HP ipaq PDA
It was a great product, Gave me handheld wifi in a day where it was carry a laptop or nothing. But then shorty after, smart phones gave me the ability to access the web without having to carry a second device. The day I got my first smart phone was the last day I turned on the Ipaq.

Never making that mistake again, never buying a tablet. I see no need for any product in between a phone & laptop.

Bought a fake 9800gt when i built my first pc ......still hurts

GTX 480 for $500 around the same time my son was abandoning pc for consoles. It's been gathering dust for eighteen months.

Hardware:

- HTC HD Pro - sluggish, useless brick
- my current Enermax case - keeps on vibrating and I can't seem to isolate where it's coming from - repalced all the fans but it didn't make much difference
- Thermalte UFO CPU fan - didn't make enough research prior to the purchase, cooling wasn't much better than the box fan, it was loud (very very loud) and the light it emitted could cause a seizure

Software:

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