In Pictures: 16 Of The PC Industry's Most Epic Failures
In Pictures: 16 Of The PC Industry's Most Epic Failures
By
Sometimes The Glass Is Half Empty
Every industry has its ups and downs, and the history of personal computers is littered with both. Rather than hitting you with another list of favorites, we thought we'd mix things up with some of the most prolific lows, botched products, and major irritations that we've endured over the past decade-plus. Some of the best ideas came from our readers. Others are the personal pet peeves of a long-time reviewer. So please, indulge one man's therapeutic rants as as we reminisce about some of the PC industry's most notable failures.
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True that...how about Millennium Edition also.
Also, amen to the comments about Intel's boxed Heatsink/Fan HSF. Not only were those two clear plastic halves of the pin extremely easy to split apart but, some mainboards required me to push entirely way tooo hard before hearing the "click" of the black clip finally seating properly. I still have pictures of a few Intel boxed boards that were so incredibly warped by the force of the HSF retaining clips that they caused internal damage to the boards (opened traces or something) and were never able to POST properly. I believe that mess ended with Intel cross-shipping at least a dozen new mainboards and my store just eating the cost of some after-market Zalman coolers to get the builds out on time. From then on, I only used the boxed coolers for replacement parts and simple bench-testing until the design improved a little bit years later. They're solution is still far worse than AMD's IMO though.
True that...how about Millennium Edition also.
RDRAM failed, not because of RDRAM, but because of the Pentium III. Which brings us to the Willamette too. The Williamette reached 2 GHz on the same process technology that the Pentium III/Coppermine reached 1.1 GHz, and outperformed it EASILY at virtually everything at that clock speed, and even when introduced at 1.5 GHz (compared to 1 GHz Pentium III) beat it in virtually all benchmarks. Why? A good part of it was the performance of RDRAM, which finally was attached to a processor that could use the bandwidth. The bad was the x87 was greatly weakened so developers would use SSE 2, which was very powerful and considerably better. I guess that's a plus and a minus.
Ironically, RDRAM died just when it was finally better than the competition. The price had finally come down to the price of other memory, and the performance was better for the Pentium 4 than DDR. But, when they released it for the Pentium III, which couldn't use the bandwidth (although even then, the i840 had very good performance by using interleaving to reduce latency), the performance was bad because of the processor. The cost was excessive too, although it was wrong attributed to royalty payments.
While the Willamette wasn't a great processor, the really bad one in the Pentium 4 line was Prescott. I think most people would pick that one as the worst.
Others might be all the Super 7 chipsets. The 386 kind of sucked (added a lot, but the performance wasn't that great). The K5 was a big headache, being very late, lacking MMX (which was a selling point by the time it came out, due to be late) and stuck at 116.7 MHz. AMD 486/DX2 80 MHz had that nasty tendency to have the internal cache go bad. i820 really sucked, being late, using the wrong memory (RDRAM) for the processor, and then having bugs with the MTH. Worse than that, for only a little more, the i840 had much better performance, and more features. Cyrix should have been known as Cryix, because you would if you bought one. The headaches those things caused ...
Maybe I just had bad luck or an unusually high amount of cosmic radiation finding it's way to my disks but I'd never trust a Zip Disk again.
I never got why Vista was considered so terrible. Yeah, user account control was irritating, but if you disable it you're getting 99% of the Windows 7 experience. I never jumped on the 'I hate Vista!' bandwagon. I actually had it on my server until very recently.
Windows ME... now there I agree. I came this close to adding it to the list, I think I even wrote up a draft. the problem is, It's been so long and I used it so little before giving up on it and going back to Win 98 SE back in the day, i couldn't speak about what was wrong with it with real credibility. So I figured I'd best leave it out.
But yeah, ME sucked.
Yeah it was, Scrum. They both sucked really, really hard compared to the competition of the day.
Windows 7 > Vista > XP
Definitely not face-palm worthy.
imo hd-dvd (competitor of blu-ray), coolermaster psus (low end), firewire are fails too.
Good call SteelCity1981
The theory of having all the hottest components in a line from the front to the back of the case was good for cooling but it's done now in many modern cases without the need to stray from the many friendly flavors of ATX, Mid-ATX, Micro-ATX, uATX etc