Weekend Open Forum: Your most regretted tech purchase?

[Matthew DeCarlo]

The tech industry has an unmatched propensity for causing buyer's remorse. Gadgets are meticulously engineered so they appeal to both the hedonist and the utilitarian, while annual refreshes ensure that you're always one step behind the curve. It's a formula that generally works well enough: you're regularly supplied with new toys and companies get to report record earnings.

However, it's only a matter of time before even the most prudent shopper gets burned -- be it their own fault or not. Whether you invested in tech that didn't pan out (like HD-DVD), built a new computer weeks before a major generational shift, splurged on a "luxury" item or have an unboxed iPad 2 in your closet, we're sure all of you have at least one tech purchase you wish you never made.

Besides preordering the occasional dud (Dragon Age II most recently), I think the Thermaltake Tai-Chi is my most regretted purchase. Although it's served me well over the last seven years, it doesn't have any of the trappings you'd expect from a modern enthusiast chassis. Yet, because it cost about $450, I feel guilty replacing it. I probably would've been better off with a $100-$200 case.

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[Leeky]

My most regretted recent purchase... Replacing my GTX280 with a 1GB GTX460 without researching the difference as the purchase was made on a whim.

It lasted a day before being replaced by my old GPU, and I then sold it off for a profit -- at least financially it didn't hurt me.

There's probably others, but I don't recall them right now.

 

[treetops]

I regret going with a fan cooling system instead of water cooling iv spent more then enough replacing fans in the last 3 years that I could have got a very low budget water cooling system for my video card\cpu. I regret more then a few game purchases especially post apoc mayhem had took about 5 hours to find a multiplayer game a few weeks after release. hard truck is another. Then there is halo reach and modern warefare 2, just not my cup of tea and cost me 60$ a pop. Also the xbox 360 i bought from ebay about a year ago for about 100$, couldnt really find any games i liked ended up lending it to my little bro until who knows.

 

[IvanAwfulitch]

I don't regret any of my hardware purchases because they were well thought-out at the time of my purchase, particularly with budget limits in mind.

However, pretty much every major 60 dollar title that I've willingly purchased has been a big let-down. Buying Crysis before it went on sale was one of my bigger regrets in recent memory, and I've gained a much tighter hold over my wallet ever since.

 

[MrAnderson]

Buying a ViewSonic gTablet... it has good hardware but if I want to take advantage I'm going to have to put roms on it myself which sounded like fun... but I totally lost motivation...

I would pay ViewSonic to take the time to update the OS... no more than 25 bucks to move everyone to ICS though since it is not like they have to write the entire OS... just test and tweak...

 

[Julio Franco]

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.

 

[TrevDog]

I regret buying a Zip drive. I waffled back and forth between a larger hard drive or the Zip and the Zip made sense for only a very short time. It really opened my eyes to how fast technology advances.

 

[daweimon]

Bought an i7 960 based computer just after the current gen came out. Don't really know what I was thinking about at the time.

 

[Guest]

WORST Tech Purchase - Android HTC Inspire for AT&T... Followed by AMD CPU's. WORST TECH Decision: Getting a Google Account, followed by Facebook. Never again... for any of these.

 

[ChadFM]

Picked up a Palm Pre on contract, just before HP's buyout of Palm was announced. Bad move.

 

[Scorpionking20]

Mass Effect 3. Worst letdown for me ever, and I spent 80 on the deluxe edition. The game was great, but the ending ruined years of experience for me.

 

[Guest]

My worst would probably be an HD-DVD player.

 

[Guest]

Windows Me.

 

[mrtraver]

I made some poor choices for my first PC build (2005) that i regretted for years. I did lots of research on pricing, and bought components from multiple sources, but I didn't make the wisest choices for the components themselves. I spent too much on a motherboard and RAM with overclocking capabilities that I never used, and on a 74GB Raptor, but not enough on GPU and CPU.

But, that PC is still running, although in a different case and with a fanless radeon hd5450 replacing the geforce 6600GT that died. I am still using the same case (Thermaltake Tsunami Dream) and raptor for my current build.

I also regret buying a refurbished dell laptop 10 or 12 years ago. i thought that since i could play games on my PII-350 with a GeForce 2 MX, I could also play the same ones on the dell with a PII-400 with more RAM (256mb!). I didn't know enough to realize that integrated graphics sucked!

 

[Guest]

iPod touch, what a waste.

 

[cptmds]

Buying a Dell Dimension 3000 in early 2005...and not realizing that the video card in my PII 400MHz was better than what the Dell came with.
It still runs (with a PCI (!!!) GeForce 5550), and now serves as a Linux server, but I still regret having wasted $1000. If only I had gone down the street to the local computer store...I would have got a lot more for the same price.

Thinking SLI = 2x the performance, with none of the bugs. Boy was I wrong.

And the ViewSonic LCD screen that is currently making a high-pitch whining noise right in front of me.

 

[EEatGDL]

Two regrets in different ocassions: first one was when I built my first PC from zero [lack of experience choosing components] about 8-9 years ago -I was 11-12 yo- when I picked a mobo D102GCC2 from Intel for saving $20 USD from a mobo that had dual-channel memory and supported C2 processors. I regreted it for 2 main points: very noisy and hot with both P4 and PD and a huge bottleneck of a single channel 2 GB @533 MHz of DDR2 memory (max memory and frequency supported by the mobo).

And the second regret: buying Vista 64-bits for its full price ~4 years ago even after the SP1 was launched. Later I took a student's promotion for upgrading to W7 Pro 64-bits for only $30 USD and I haven't regreted it.

 

[aspleme]

I'd say I probably have two purchases I can think of that fall into the regret category.

The first was a couple years ago, I got a Sony Cybershot 7.2 Megapixel camera after reading reviews about its performance and considering how much better it would be than my old 2 Megapixel Toshiba camera. However, I'm still not happy with its low light level performance and expect to pay more attention when making my next camera purchase. I'll probably either get something with a 4/3 sensor, a DSLR, or some other improved sensor (looking into CCD instead of CMOS).

The other purchase was the Kindle Fire. I have a Nook Touch but I've yet to get a smartphone and the idea of watching movies, browsing the web, remote access of my desktop, and apps (especially games), was appealing. However, coming to realize how limited the Amazon apps selection was because of all the hardware they didn't bother to include in the Fire made me decide it wasn't worth it so I returned it. (Nice of Best Buy to have their special on items that let me buy the Fire in November and return it in January for a full refund.)

 

[Guest]

Similar to the article author I regret buying my Silverstone Temjin 05 case. It was a great case at the time but it was expensive and it's thoroughly dated when compared to modern tool-less design cases. It's also overkill in terms of size and expandability.

I also regret buying high-end graphics cards (anything over £250), when you get better value and performance overall by buying £100 mid-range cards on a more regular basis instead.

I sort of regret buying my second generation Drobo, when the Drobo FS came out around a year later and is a much more useful device. It's still not ideal though (could use 10GbE instead of GbE) so hopefully I can just wait out for a better version in the future instead.

 

[Guest]

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....

 

[PaulWuzHere]

The Tai-Chi is amazing! PM me and I'll take it off your hands for $200

On topic, most regrettable tech purchase was the iPhone 3g, what a piece of junk...

 

[Ranger1st]

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.

 

[rvnwlfdroid]

I would have to say my Denon LA-2150K Karaoke and Laserdisc player. It was a great product but a very short life span. As in Laserdisc itself was not around very long. I?m remembering it costing around $1,400 and then about a year later spending another $1,000 for a DVD player back in 97. At least the dvd format is still around.

 

[TheLok]

Worst was a late 90's Acer CD burner, would coaster disks 75% of the time, guarantee failure if the screen saver came on or if you moved the mouse too quickly.

Second, LS120 Superdisk.

 

[Marnomancer]

Mine? Buying a Sempron maybe. But I didn't really regret it, after seeing how my PC was still faster than my friends' Phenom X3. Haha.
What I really regret was not waiting for the Sandy Bridge. But still, that wouldn't hav made much difference, seeing the budget I was on.