Your dumbest PC purchase?

Hmmmm..... Probably A 512mb stick of kingmax DDR333 which I thought would be future proof with a 266fsb Athlon, then went to a P4 that ofcourse used DDR400.

I cooked the DDR333 in an act of stupidity while waiting for the newer computer.

Another one would be the very same DDR400 I bought, Corsair matched pair DDR400, about 400-500 bucks at the time

After a series of shit purchases and a time when I owned 4-6 computers all midrange spec type boxes, I realised that building computer for the sake of building computers was a shit idea.

Now, I built a top end PC in August 2005 and I still have all the same parts today, upgraded to 2gb of ram after a little while. Also put it into a shuttle case.

Pretty much every computer I built before that was ill advised.

I also ended up with 2 dual core P3 boards, a matched pair of P3 1Ghz and a pair of P3 600s that NEVER worked at all.

One last one, I bought an antec case, small profile that fit a full ATX board, then the board I was going to put in it didnt work so I bought a VIA EPIA thing that I used for about 5 minutes then never again. Only ever used the 40mm fan off it for a new chipset fan at once stage.

Alot of this stuff was punctuated by me moving house 3 times in the last 5 years, so alot of the stuff I still have, just bowed up and never unpacked.

I also have 3 complete water cooling kits.

I am starting to realise where all my money has gone

 

I bought a Gigabyte hybrid digital TV 'tunner' card. (That's how they spelt 'tuner' in the driver install software.)

Biggest piece of crap in the world.

 

first computer purchase back in 2000? computer fair, a slot A thunderbird that was sitting on a FIC, fucking FIC-SD11.......to those that have owned the earlier revision may relate.

 

IBM sux

IBM Aptiva 486 DX 2/50 4MB RAM 850MB HD ~ $2800 in ~1995
Extra 8 MB RAM 6 months later + $200

 

1. Upgrading from a Intel Pentium 150 to an IBM/Cyrix MII 300+ (225MHz), I was a victim of the early Pentium ratings. I think it cost me close to $300 for the 'upgrade'.

2. Buying a Shuttle SN25P - Shit onboard sound, no PCI slot.

 

P4 willamette(sp?) 1.8ghz when i could have got a 1.4ghz thunderbird that was MUCH cheaper and better

2x256 RD800 which costed an arm and a leg

Asus P5B-VM - didn't research properly abt its OC ability, it sucked

 

OH, I ALSO GOT A tdk 40X CD BURNER for like $300 when it was top shit, 3 months later, 52x for $100 was released!

 

I still use a socket7 FIC VA-502, IIRC didn't the SD11 have trouble supplying sufficient juice to the AGP cards & issues with RAM?

My biggest mistake? buying a VIA K8T800 chipset motherboard and assuming that it'll work well with my Radeon 9600XT... talk about unrectified incompatibility issues! LMAO

FWIW the VIA platforms of that persuasion seem to prefer nVidia class GPUs

 

an ASUS Radeon X850Pro, which later burnt out in a light session of Diablo II on a cold winters morning.

Was hell getting a refund from scorpion technology (worst customer service experience ever) but finally I ended up with a 7900GT.. now i have seen the light O=)

edit: also expecting a A64 3800+ to reach 3.0GHz on a VIA K8T890 chipset..

 

I bought an ATi Radeon 8500DV All-In-Wonder, for about $850. The fancy card with the most-est features at the time, including a digital TV tuner before digital TV was even in Australia (and is a different type of digital so never worked when it did! only analog TV worked) and the awesome radio remote wonder. I still have it to this day, and I can't bear to get rid of it or justify the vast loss of value.

Then, about 6 months later, they brought out the 9700 Pro's, which were the best video cards for quite some time after that. So I went and bought a 9700Pro All-In-Wonder, for about $750.

I bought a Sound Blaster AWE64 (ISA card!) for about $330, just before the release of the Live! PCI cards. *slaps self* It was shit... bugger all different from the SB16.

I bought an 'Eagle S3 Trio' 3D accelerator video card, which couldn't really accelerate games or let me play any which used 3D acceleration, and the games that it could play it mucked up the textures and was really horrible to use. I think it was cheap-ish at the time ($70-$90?) but it wasn't worth 2c.

 

KT3 Ultra - OK it was supposed to be the one on the box cover (extra drive controllers on mobo, extra usb dongles, diagnostic dongle, cables and all sorts of other goodies, Absolutely jam packed with goodies).

Get home, open the box, and its a "value" board with 1 drive cable.

 

Arguably buying my last 2 PCs was the dumbest thing I've done, considering the value lost to depreciation.

Other than that I have a bad habit of getting excited about some piece of hardware for sale on classifieds/forums/ebay so I go ahead and get it, then realise I don't actually need it (or better yet can't actually use ). Usually manage to resell items and get my money back .

 

I bought a McAffee anti virus package thing for $100 years ago at harvey norman, then when i got home, i ripped box apart reading how to use it etc... only finding out that i already had McAffee CD on my computer(full disk etc..) And worse thing was we couldn't return because they said we probably burnt a copy

 

How about a Compaq K6-2, ugh.

 

LOL
I still have one of those working .

 

Ibm aptiva pentium 200mhz........wat a hunk of #@$@# $3500 package , was first computer didnt know what i was doing, next week pentium 2 came out....

 

A HP cd burner back in 1997. Cost like $800. Supported up to 2x, but only 1x discs were cheap enough to be feasible. 80 minutes for a cd.. woo! And if you even like moved your mouse too much, a buffer underrun would kill it.

 

watercooling.

 

a second 8800GTX...it gives less than 900 extra 3dmarks, did not fix the stuttering frames in oblivion, and now I've had to take it out and put it on the shelf as my mobo only has 2 x PCI-E slot and I need the second one for a SAS RAID card ;(

 

A Hercules Stingray 128/3d Voodoo Rush card. It looked to have exciting future and new features but was actually a lot slower than a normal voodoo1 card very dissapointing (and expensive) mistake.