How crap is your PC?

The Gopher

Is anyone else in agreement that we are being ripped off by the PC manufacturers who sell us good for the first year products at 4 figure sums?
I got my first PC(Packard Bell) in early 2000.It lasted in great condition for about 18 months-2 years.For about the past year it has been atrocious.My internet browser window freezes constantly.Error messages never stop popping up.Its pissing me off!
And on top of that my 4 page a minute printer in reality takes around 2 miutes to print a single text page.

Rant over.

Redshift

My first PC back in 1998 was a stupid friggin Compaq yoke after that I had a Gateway after that I had enough of prebuilt PCs and all the crap they entail. I now have exactly the machine I want built from quality parts and assembled by myself it has only but exactly what I want in it. It doesn't crash or act the mick like a prebuilt machine. If you can do it I would deffo recomend it and lets be honest it's not that hard not of the connectors and devices will only fit in the correct way. If your up to the challenge it's the way to go if not get someone to do it for you I have built a few for different people and they never had any major problems either. I think it's down to the quality of the the parts used I belive in buying the very best mother board ect you can afford as it will pay later when you have a sweet machine that is rock steady. You don't know what rubbish you getting in a prebuilt jobby.

Typedef

girls.

I have a 386 doing useful things .... don't knock your PC hardware until it bites you and makes you rabid...

CuLT

Originally posted by The Gopher
Is anyone else in agreement that we are being ripped off by the PC manufacturers who sell us good for the first year products at 4 figure sums?
I got my first PC(Packard Bell) in early 2000.It lasted in great condition for about 18 months-2 years.For about the past year it has been atrocious.My internet browser window freezes constantly.Error messages never stop popping up.Its pissing me off!
And on top of that my 4 page a minute printer in reality takes around 2 miutes to print a single text page.

Rant over.

Thats what generally happens if you never format :rolleyes: . Windows 98 needs to be formatted every couple of months to keep it in decent running order...

That said, XP is quite low maintainance, thus it is my favourite OS . Haven't reinstalled for nigh on 10 weeks now...

Neil_Sedaka

Well at the mo, I'm using an Atari Jaguar motherboard, the ram from a 1984 daisywheel printer, an Iomega Zip as a hard drive, the keyboard from an Acorn Electron and a 14" B&W TV for a monitor.

I programmed the OS meself, nothing fancy mind!
I have net access through an old Binatone cordless phone from Woodies DIY.

It's solid as a rock! only crashed twice in the last 4 years and that's only cos I got a long distance phone call at the same time as Scrapheap challenge was on.

I have a big box of old air conditioner parts I stole from a wino recently and I'm planning on "merging" these with a speak 'n' spell machine, who knows?

oneweb

In fairness, there's not much reason a PC would go all bad unless you've been installing/uninstalling apps, deleting/overwriting files etc etc, and over a few months that's bound to happen. Even one stupid app install can mush up a perfect system.

In the process of moving over to Win2k and lovin' it so far. Win98SE is getting to the stage of exhibiting some silly quirks. Having said that, I use GoBack which is fantastic for undoing stupid app installs, system tweaks that go horribly, horribly wrong.

Also, upgrading software to the latest releases on hardware that hasn't been upgraded isn't always a good thing to do. It's worth keeping versions of less bloaty software if you need to re-install it at a later date on the older hardware (newer versions often need higher specs)

Mossy Monk

i have the finest piece of crap you are ever going to find within a hard plastic case. let's take now as an example. i am on the internet and listening to mp3's via Winamp. the internet pages take more time to display than if i wasn't listening to mp3's. multi tasking is my PC's arch enemy. then again this beast is nearly 6 years old so it has served me well. i am in the process of fixing this little problem at the moment

Dr. Dre

Gopher, as has been previously mentioned, the symptoms you describe are nothing to do with the PC vendor, it's simply an OS problem, ALL OS's need to be reinstalled every-so-often depending on your use, e.g. if you were fond of PC mag cover disks and the cr@p they have on them, then I would say every 6 months would be a good idea to start from scratch.
I have a gateway P3 500Mhz from Oct. 1998 and it has been, and still is, a great workhorse.
I use it as a sort of file server and internet gateway, has never given me any trouble.

Saruman

As Typedef will agree.. the most common thing you got in Tech support was "this computer is crap, it keeps crashing!" and the reason? 99% of the time its the lamer themself that has arsed it up by not taking care of the OS.. So format the damn thing and stop complaining about the vendor. If you are that sure the vendor sucks.. fine do it yourself.. go buy the bits and build your own nuclear powered, PC with a fluc capacitor cpu and a gig of video ram.. And use it to type word documents