Whats been your WORST computer related purchase?

[Automobili3XF]

Corsair H55, twice.

Fuck that cooler.

[Thorium19]

the sony PS4 adapter was a massive waste of money for me, it barely worked wirelessly, and when it did the bluetooth built in to my board was miles better. I just use my PS4 controller wired in using DS4Windows and that's a far better method.

I also regret getting the G903. I loved the wireless, but the double click issues were awful, I even got a replacement and that's got issues with the right click not making a solid connection with the switch, so I get pulled out of scope whenever I'm sniping. Getting the glorious model O was a far better buy, at a third of the price, even if it is wired. Guess I can always do the G305 mod if I ever want it to be wireless. In the meantime, I'm going to buy some new switches and attempt to repair one of the G903s with higher quality switches and see if that makes it better.

[Kisai]

On 2/26/2020 at 7:36 PM, computer1up said:

I also got a Banana Pi some day to build a cheapass NAS, but that went horrible and I would suggest anyone to skip single board computers like the Raspberry Pi or the Banana pi or whatever for these purposes. Their main problem is that they run off of (Micro) SD cards, which aren't exactly reliable. Which ís something you want in a NAS. 

Pi systems are utterly rubbish for anything (pretty much anything that is a ARM SBC.) Their use cases are extremely narrow, and mostly useful for things like hobby electronics (Eg robotics) where the entire thing needs to run off conventional batteries. Similar SBC's (eg NES/SNES Mini) are often used primarily because they are "just good enough" to to run one specific software package, but often not good enough to actually be reliable. Anything that primarily boots from flash memory will be this way, and devices like the Wii/WiiU, 3DS/2DS, and Switch will all have the same problem of failing flash memory eventually. Device manufacturers do not care, you will buy their new thing and have to throw out your old console and games.

 

Pi's most common use right now is selling replica game consoles loaded with pirate games. Go figure. Unreliable parts go into rubbish to hawk on eBay to people who know better.

[AngryBeaver]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

Pi systems are utterly rubbish for anything (pretty much anything that is a ARM SBC.) Their use cases are extremely narrow, and mostly useful for things like hobby electronics (Eg robotics) where the entire thing needs to run off conventional batteries. Similar SBC's (eg NES/SNES Mini) are often used primarily because they are "just good enough" to to run one specific software package, but often not good enough to actually be reliable. Anything that primarily boots from flash memory will be this way, and devices like the Wii/WiiU, 3DS/2DS, and Switch will all have the same problem of failing flash memory eventually. Device manufacturers do not care, you will buy their new thing and have to throw out your old console and games.

 

Pi's most common use right now is selling replica game consoles loaded with pirate games. Go figure. Unreliable parts go into rubbish to hawk on eBay to people who know better.

Really I have seen them used for much more than that.

 

The pi4 is really good tbh.

 

Pi hole servers (dns, dhcp) that allows network wide secure dns via DoH or DoT.

 

VPN

 

NAS

 

IPS/IDS

 

They can also be used to get around some restrictions in the business world. Like a usb software key network mounted drive. So you can run thr software on 3 machines for example instead of one at a time.

 

They also have a ton of projects like smart mirrors. 

 

You can use one to replace expensive hardware to for example monitor your water temp and adjust fan speed off it.

 

Then you have all the other things it can do. I have seem people mount them to a drone to do some war driving to map out all wifi networks in say a square mile. They have also been turned into evil twin hotspots for legitimate and illegal purposes.

 

Anyways I guess my point is they are actually very handy devices. I have personally purchases them for me teenager and his nephews to get them more familiar with python and tweak their interest into all the projects available.

[computer1up]

Pi's are good for a lot of things, just not as fileservers with an HDD attached to it. 

 

Though... What I said about the SD card reliability is kind of a problem in situations where it needs to be on for extended periods of time. 

We have a Raspberry Pi 1 in our hackerspace running custom bar-software. What it does is it scans barcodes on food items, and checks them out with the balance you deposited. The software and configurations had to be stored on our NAS and loaded in every time on program startup in order to combat SD card corruption. 

OK, we might not have used the most reliable SD card ever, but SD cards in general aren't meant to run an entire OS off of. 

 

If you're doing stuff like a robot, media player or electronics project, they're awesome. But I definitely wouldn't use them in a production environment. The Banana Pi that I had was especially bad since the Allwinner chips aren't exactly stable in my experience, and software support is fairly limited compared to the Raspberry. Also fun fact. I was in a bus here in the Netherlands one day, and the media display showing stops and arrival times and stuff wasn't working. It hung on bootup... With the Raspbian logo showing

 

Also, decoding h.265 on even a RPi 3 is a nightmare. I've even tried live transcoding on my Intel NUC 6CAYH which has QuickSync (the NUC was in a different room for other purposes), and that didn't work properly. Eventually I gave up on the whole idea of cheap media players and got an Apple TV 4K, which has literally been the only dedicated mediaplayer which smoothly played back my h.265 video. 

10 hours ago, Kisai said:

Anything that primarily boots from flash memory will be this way, and devices like the Wii/WiiU, 3DS/2DS, and Switch will all have the same problem of failing flash memory eventually.

Ah yes. My iPhone 6S got increeedibly slow after like 4.5 years of usage, I suspect due to worn down flash. Opening the calculator app literally took half a minute. My XS works so much better. Anyway, at least SSD manufacturers are trying to combat aging a bit more. I've yet to have an SSD fail on me. Though I mostly got Samsung, Intel and Crucial. 

[Andreas Lilja]

Bought a second 980 back then, for SLI. Didn't really sell at a loss because of the crypto-mining surge tho. 

[Kisai]

8 hours ago, AngryBeaver said:

 

Anyways I guess my point is they are actually very handy devices. I have personally purchases them for me teenager and his nephews to get them more familiar with python and tweak their interest into all the projects available.

Pi's are toys, they do not make very good tools. They are unreliable, have limited practical use, and are designed to be thrown away when a better one comes out just like other toys. You're not putting one of these things in your home and having it live behind the water heater for 30 years.

 

As for the user who tries to boot an OS off them. Don't. If you're trying to build something that needs to boot without writing to the device itself, boot it from PXE and have a proper file server somewhere in a closet deliver the image. That way you side-step both the sd-card unreliability and the device's own unreliability by only having to maintain the OS image on a machine that has the network capacity to deliver the image.

 

Booting from SD cards or NAND USB drives is super slow. Which goes back to the entire problem with using Pi's for anything. They are educational toys with a build quality to match. When people start buying them just to make evil pirate projects (emulators, kodi boxes, evil twin hotspots, etc) they are designed to be thrown away. It's not 1975, where you have to build every computer from scratch and occasional kill some parts because of crappy documentation.

 

I do have a hate-on for SaaS (cloud and virtual machine) services and don't want to pay for services that are controlled by some third party over the internet when there is clearly no need for it, but rolling your own solutions using what are effectively hobby toys puts yourself in danger. I would love nothing more than to have a "home hub" that I can connect security devices, environmental monitoring and such over wired PoE and have it powered in a closet somewhere, so that that data stays within the home, but I also know that a lot of the IoT crap being sold is basically a single sensor and an ARM chip that runs on batteries or micro-USB/USB-C and wastes a stupid amount of energy to do very little.

[AngryBeaver]

7 hours ago, Kisai said:

Pi's are toys, they do not make very good tools. They are unreliable, have limited practical use, and are designed to be thrown away when a better one comes out just like other toys. You're not putting one of these things in your home and having it live behind the water heater for 30 years.

 

As for the user who tries to boot an OS off them. Don't. If you're trying to build something that needs to boot without writing to the device itself, boot it from PXE and have a proper file server somewhere in a closet deliver the image. That way you side-step both the sd-card unreliability and the device's own unreliability by only having to maintain the OS image on a machine that has the network capacity to deliver the image.

 

Booting from SD cards or NAND USB drives is super slow. Which goes back to the entire problem with using Pi's for anything. They are educational toys with a build quality to match. When people start buying them just to make evil pirate projects (emulators, kodi boxes, evil twin hotspots, etc) they are designed to be thrown away. It's not 1975, where you have to build every computer from scratch and occasional kill some parts because of crappy documentation.

 

I do have a hate-on for SaaS (cloud and virtual machine) services and don't want to pay for services that are controlled by some third party over the internet when there is clearly no need for it, but rolling your own solutions using what are effectively hobby toys puts yourself in danger. I would love nothing more than to have a "home hub" that I can connect security devices, environmental monitoring and such over wired PoE and have it powered in a closet somewhere, so that that data stays within the home, but I also know that a lot of the IoT crap being sold is basically a single sensor and an ARM chip that runs on batteries or micro-USB/USB-C and wastes a stupid amount of energy to do very little.

I guess we have had drastically different experiences with them. I have yet to run into any real issue with a PI that I didn't cause myself. Mine are all running very lightweight images and pretty much only get restarted when a new kernel is pushed. They also boot in seconds (my use case). I mean yes, I am not having them in charge of something mission critical. Worst case is the pi-hole goes down and home devices can't reach anything outside my network, but that is a few second fix even in the event the PI is dead.

 

Btw on the pi 4 you have a full speed 3.0 bus which means true GB ethernet and no read/write bottle necks for your storage drives. You can also buy the sata HAT to make it even better if used as a NAS. Now you aren't going to be running a plex server that provides transcoding or anything like that. You can though, use it for lots of nice little cyber security projects around the home. A single PI 4 can replace those gimmicky home security devices you see for 250+ dollars.

 

Anyways, you are right in the sense that they can be tossed with very little concern due to their low cost. That doesn't mean they are a bad purchase though. They have lots of uses and aren't really junk or a bad purchase unless you literally have no use for it to begin with.

 

One last piece. The Pi 4 does play h265 without too much issue even at 4k60. It was hit or miss in the first few months, but it has gotten much better as things like Kodi have gotten better support for it.

[AngryBeaver]

30 minutes ago, SpicyTater said:

Its not really too terrible, but mine would be buying a PNY GTX 1060 3GB for the same price i could buy the 6 GB model for and only 20 dollars less than i could get a 1070. 

And it is PNY which is probably the worse company ever when it comes to support.

[Curious Pineapple]

Probably my iPhone 3G, I still have it somewhere and it still works fine but the most interesting thing it ever did was run Android badly.

[VersuS]

oof, a few contenders...
Bluetooth laser keyboard that never worked or the pentium 3 that pushed me away from pc's in my teens comes to mind first, but internet from Virgin Media I think has to take the crown... Screwed up so badly we wound up getting every penny back we'd given them over a 9 month period.
 

[Allmykidsareblack]

Corsair 100i water cooler

[freeagent]

I’ve spent a ton of time bashing H100s and their replicas.. but I got 1 year of great performance with 120x38s, and it tapered off for the next 5 years. I beat it with my fire breathing x5690. When I got my 3770K it had a hard time with it after 4400mhz. I gave it to my brother and he ran it on his 7700K for about a year and a half until it died. He got his cpu up to 5ghz for the first time with it. Mine was quiet for a week. I think he said it sounded like a minion with a rattle can lol. My worst purchase was an X2 4200 when they first came out. They were supposed to be great clocking chips but I killed my asus and abit boards with it. I already had a sandy 3700 and Toledo 4400. It was an expensive weekend, 2 flagship boards. That was the weekend I moved to Intel lol. I just started looking back recently now that my intel setups have aged gracefully, but they can still perform if you kick em in the nuts.

My PNY GTX295 was sent in twice, my Revo Drive was denied, oh yes, 3 out of four of my Raptor 150s died, including my windowed one because you know there was a premium. Enterprise my ass. My Zalman 9500 that was supposed to be better than my xp90. I don’t break many fan blades but I managed to break one on both of the fans that came with my D14 lol.. not sure how but as much as I liked them I don’t really recommend them.. to brittle.., but this is the first time I’ve said it and many many moons have passed since. Oh yeah and the ocz ram cooler.. the fan clip slipped while my rig was running and dropped onto the backside of my brand new zotac amp gtx285, there was sporks. Every AMD board I have had in the past has died, I’ve had quite a few Intel board and knock wood I haven’t had issues. Killed lots of D9 ram with them though. 
 

it’s like sitting in your living room shredding hundred dollar bills. 

 

 

[atxcyclist]

I went 7600k instead of going Ryzen when both were new. Not saying an R7 1800 would have been better for gaming, but it would have put me into a platform that was going to have more staying power. Also, buying a GTX 1060 was a somewhat bad purchase, should have waited for an RTX 2060, but didn't really know about the RTX line at the time.

[Number Muncher]

A Radeon 4870x2 back in 2008. It was fine when it worked, but that wasn't very often. I swore off of ATI/AMD for more than a decade - I just bought a 5500XT for a media computer about a month ago.

 

Edit: Well, that or a used MacBook Pro from 2011. It worked for about 20 hours before the GPU overheated and became disconnected from the motherboard. It's not under warranty and a new logic board is $600. Apparently they can be fixed at home, but I haven't found the energy to mess with it.