[Inspector Lagomorf]

I hereby devote this thread as a universal shitlist for all that is within the world of inherently defective computer hardware, be it from big-time manufacturers, or from the little people.

I'm going to start with what I feel is the most obvious candidate.


TP-LINK TL-WR841N Wireless N300 Home Router, 300Mpbs




Rated 4.5 stars on Amazon with 5,260 customer reviews. Only $19.99 for a decent-speed (good enough to handle up to a 100Mbps connection, anyway) router. I mean, wow. You can't really get much better than that for computer hardware, can you? Installation was a breeze as well, and when I first fired this thing up, I got a decent wifi signal from all the way across the parking lot. Talk about getting bang for one's buck, right?

Well, you'd be wrong. Two weeks in to using this router, and I started having frequently dropped connections. My Note 4 couldn't hold a wifi connection for more than 15 seconds on this POS. That's not even long enough for a speed test to be carried out. I went from getting 112Mbps download on speed tests that I was running on this router to a pathetic 0.5Mbps. I tried everything suggested by the manufacturer - rebooting the router, installing the latest firmware, changing the settings. Then I did a bit of Google fu and tried to find out if other people had the issue and resolved it. As is the case with most IT shortfalls, the threads I did look up were filled with people bewailing "I'M HAVING THE EXACT SAME ISSUE, PLEASE HELP".

How could this be? It has a 4.5 star average review on Amazon... Surely you can't rig that many positive reviews, can you?

... Until you see that half of the 50 most recent reviews are all 1-star "stay as far away from this as possible" warnings.

Well, back to my Netgear router. I know that routers tend to be volatile beasts as far as maintaining stable connections, but Netgear has never steered me wrong before, at least when I've been using it. This piece of junk on the other hand... ugh. I still feel dirty that I bought this Chinese crapware. At least I was able to get a refund.

[DustFalcon85]

*InB4 Jimmy/Viper/Person of Color joins in the fun.* Here's this one from Viper.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Comrade Major, on 22 April 2015 - 12:37 PM, said:

I hereby devote this thread as a universal shitlist for all that is within the world of inherently defective computer hardware, be it from big-time manufacturers, or from the little people.

I'm going to start with what I feel is the most obvious candidate.


TP-LINK TL-WR841N Wireless N300 Home Router, 300Mpbs




Rated 4.5 stars on Amazon with 5,260 customer reviews. Only $19.99 for a decent-speed (good enough to handle up to a 100Mbps connection, anyway) router. I mean, wow. You can't really get much better than that for computer hardware, can you? Installation was a breeze as well, and when I first fired this thing up, I got a decent wifi signal from all the way across the parking lot. Talk about getting bang for one's buck, right?

Well, you'd be wrong. Two weeks in to using this router, and I started having frequently dropped connections. My Note 4 couldn't hold a wifi connection for more than 15 seconds on this POS. That's not even long enough for a speed test to be carried out. I went from getting 112Mbps download on speed tests that I was running on this router to a pathetic 0.5Mbps. I tried everything suggested by the manufacturer - rebooting the router, installing the latest firmware, changing the settings. Then I did a bit of Google fu and tried to find out if other people had the issue and resolved it. As is the case with most IT shortfalls, the threads I did look up were filled with people bewailing "I'M HAVING THE EXACT SAME ISSUE, PLEASE HELP".

How could this be? It has a 4.5 star average review on Amazon... Surely you can't rig that many positive reviews, can you?

... Until you see that half of the 50 most recent reviews are all 1-star "stay as far away from this as possible" warnings.

Well, back to my Netgear router. I know that routers tend to be volatile beasts as far as maintaining stable connections, but Netgear has never steered me wrong before, at least when I've been using it. This piece of junk on the other hand... ugh. I still feel dirty that I bought this Chinese crapware. At least I was able to get a refund.

I have the smaller single-antenna model and it serves me very well. And I've had it for two years now.

[Person of Color]

>Using generic routers without open source Linux firmware

Fucking kill yourself. Enjoy your NSA botnet. MASTER RACE





Let me add the following hardware to the list:

-"But I'm saving so much money!" Power supplies. Don't be a cheap fuck. It's like $60-80 for a decent unit that isn't designed by people who stir fry dogs on their lunch break.
-"In betweener" video cards. It's built for a price point dipshit. $30 more gets you something lightyears faster, don't be an asshole.
-"I'm gonna get so much pussy from this" computer cases. Anyone who spends more than $100 on a computer case is a fucking loser and should be dragged into the street and shot. There is NOTHING an Antec Three Hundred or equivalent can't do, save for quad SLI faggot rigs.
-"But it's liquid cooling bro!" You're a shithead, I'm sorry, how far is your processor overclocked again? Zero point zero? Fuck off. I hope your shit leaks and fries your entire system you prick. I can build something 90% as quiet and more effective for less than half the cost. I am the fucking master of air cooling, I'll get your pressure differential so negative it can't even enjoy pizza without complaining. I'm so good with wind I'm that brown skinned girl in a wheelchair from Captain Planet or something.
-"Endorsed by a professional virgin anything" - Once again, your 16 phase VRM's on your ASCock Fagtality board are being wasted on stock clocks and your headphones suck dick compared to Sennheisers or SteelSeries. How much pussy does Fatality or any of these other queers get? Before you say "A lot," let's just clear hookers and escorts from the list so they can have some blank paper to write their suicide notes on.

[Inspector Lagomorf]

DustFalcon85, on 22 April 2015 - 03:41 PM, said:

*InB4 Jimmy/Viper/Person of Color joins in the fun.* Here's this one from Viper.

Quite honestly, I created this thread mostly to cater to their hardware fulminations.

Quote

I have the smaller single-antenna model and it serves me very well. And I've had it for two years now.

Likely I just had bad luck and a bad router, but based on the most recent reviews for the product, I wasn't the only one with this problem. I mean, I enjoy tinkering with hardware to get optimal performance, but in general I expect things to work out of the box.

[Forge]

HP laptops. Especially the dv & G series

when part of the new owners manual calls for stripping the motherboard and pre-heating the oven to 285°F you should probably look elsewhere when making a purchase consideration

[Lunick]

I do enjoy my HP laptops but they definitely do have overheating problems, not something I can really recommend.

[The Commander]

Anything Apple, including iphones.

[Inspector Lagomorf]

Commander Cody, on 23 April 2015 - 10:55 PM, said:

Anything Apple, including iphones.

Did one kill your dog? Elaborate on this, if you please.

(I am in agreement, by the way; I'm just curious.)

[Duke of Hazzard]

Person of Color, on 22 April 2015 - 10:54 PM, said:

>Using generic routers without open source Linux firmware

Fucking kill yourself. Enjoy your NSA botnet. MASTER RACE

Buying this where I live is like using a cannon to kill a hornet.

[High Treason]

This one is easy, simply check the box for these symbols and signs;

Designed by idiots and assembled in a Chinese lavatory, a sure sign of quality... Though their newest product offers 4GB of RAM maximum, so they are getting there. At one time, they soldered pieces of plastic to their motherboards with the words "Write-Back Cache" written on them as well as hacking their non-socketed illeal BIOS to report 256KB of L2 cache was installed so that people would be fooled and buy their cheap boards.


Not a maker, but a standard. To be avoided unless you want dry joints and zinc whiskers. Many of the most respected institutions will not touch it, NASA had articles available about the problems before rohs even appeared. The inventor of Solder actually knew about this too and it is part of the reason lead was added in the first place.


Cuts every corner in the book and replaces the corner with a proprietary shape and barely spec components. Includes the Alien Ware brand for which you pay a premium.


Thought that adding mechanical relays to the VGA circuit was OK, also thought that sticking to PCI, having no 2D acceleration, no DVD decoding and requiring an existing video card whilst recommending two of their own were purchased was a really good idea. Eventually they tried to make a graphics card which needed an external power supply so that it could set itself on fire more effectively and it was still slower than the competing GeForce 2. Overpriced though luckily now defunct. Also managed to kill one of the greatest board makers ever - STB.


Controversial! But ASUS really have no place in the industry. If you are going to buy one of their cheaper products, you may as well buy the cheaper ASRock or Gigabyte models as whichever you choose, it will be shit anyway. By the time you get to their more expensive products you might as well have bought Tyan, SuperMicro, DFI or another more reputable brand. ASUS are commonly the laughing stock of industrial and datacenter techs because of a fiasco with the previously mentioned RoHS standard.


For a time, Apple made good hardware but it was expensive, these days... well... I don't got to say anything;


To be continued!

[Hendricks266]

High Treason, on 24 April 2015 - 07:01 PM, said:

Thought that adding mechanical relays to the VGA circuit was OK, also thought that sticking to PCI, having no 2D acceleration, no DVD decoding and requiring an existing video card whilst recommending two of their own were purchased was a really good idea. Eventually they tried to make a graphics card which needed an external power supply so that it could set itself on fire more effectively and it was still slower than the competing GeForce 2. Overpriced though luckily now defunct. Also managed to kill one of the greatest board makers ever - STB.

Upvote for throwing in a dig at a company that has been defunct for 13 years.

[High Treason]

Those engineers went to nVidia though, and their retarded ideas still crop up from time to time. One example being SLi, because it looks good on paper, but in reality it costs a fortune and by the time you can make any use of it - assuming it works as advertised, I find it to be lacking personally - newer versions of DirectX and OpenGL are probably around which your ancient SLi'd cards don't even support, rendering the whole thing pointless... Also, newer cards then appear to support that and you can bet they won't support your drivers as well as the new cards because they want you to buy a new SLi rig.

[Duke of Hazzard]

High Treason, on 24 April 2015 - 07:13 PM, said:

Those engineers went to nVidia though, and their retarded ideas still crop up from time to time. One example being SLi, because it looks good on paper, but in reality it costs a fortune and by the time you can make any use of it - assuming it works as advertised, I find it to be lacking personally - newer versions of DirectX and OpenGL are probably around which your ancient SLi'd cards don't even support, rendering the whole thing pointless... Also, newer cards then appear to support that and you can bet they won't support your drivers as well as the new cards because they want you to buy a new SLi rig.

SLi is a funny thing. When I found out it didn't double your VRAM I thought it was even more pointless than I thought it was before.

Twin-core GPUs tend to be overpriced, too.

[Person of Color]

Forge, on 23 April 2015 - 08:36 PM, said:

HP laptops. Especially the dv & G series

when part of the new owners manual calls for stripping the motherboard and pre-heating the oven to 285°F you should probably look elsewhere when making a purchase consideration

I see more HP than any other brand, and they cut corners in ways their competitors can only dream of. The G series don't really seem to fail though, just fall the fuck apart when dropped, with the exception of the G60 and the original G6, which are excellent computers.

I will admit their desktops are pretty good though. Sure, they're built out of no name parts, but the reliability is leaps and bounds ahead of other manufacturers, although post Michael Dell buyout Dells are even better. Also, they design their some of their mATX cases to accommodate long ass video cards, which is major brownie points in my book. What point is an i5 desktop without a good video card? My only complaint is that they fucking LOVE Seagate hard drives, Dell prefers WD.

High Treason, on 24 April 2015 - 07:01 PM, said:

Cuts every corner in the book and replaces the corner with a proprietary shape and barely spec components. Includes the Alien Ware brand for which you pay a premium.

Their newer systems are fully standard and very reliable. Dell and HP are the only companies making "good" consumer desktops right now. The only proprietary part these companies use is the front panel header, which is easily adapted with ten minutes, a thumb tack, and some connectors from a gutted case.

Dell makes these super tiny Inspiron towers that are positively awesome. Completely silent, run ice cold, super fast and they all have WD Blue drives w/64MB cache. They also have both a PCI-E x16 and x1 half height slots. We've used a few of them and they're fantastic, the case is built like a brick shithouse too. It's the only supermini I'd ever recommend, heat kills those things like crazy and these make literally zero head and have solid caps.

Also their XPS and Latitude lines are excellent, and the 2014 and up Inspiron laptops seem to be very good to excellent. But before Mike wrestled the company back, holy shit did their consumer products suck, although the 90's-2002 stuff was bulletproof.

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Thought that adding mechanical relays to the VGA circuit was OK, also thought that sticking to PCI, having no 2D acceleration, no DVD decoding and requiring an existing video card whilst recommending two of their own were purchased was a really good idea. Eventually they tried to make a graphics card which needed an external power supply so that it could set itself on fire more effectively and it was still slower than the competing GeForce 2. Overpriced though luckily now defunct. Also managed to kill one of the greatest board makers ever - STB.

AMEN. 3Dfx S-U-C-K-S. Outdated when new, sold completely on speed, Glide, and driver support.

Quote

Controversial! But ASUS really have no place in the industry. If you are going to buy one of their cheaper products, you may as well buy the cheaper ASRock or Gigabyte models as whichever you choose, it will be shit anyway. By the time you get to their more expensive products you might as well have bought Tyan, SuperMicro, DFI or another more reputable brand. ASUS are commonly the laughing stock of industrial and datacenter techs because of a fiasco with the previously mentioned RoHS standard.

Tyan and DFI aren't even in business anymore and ASRock hasn't been low end for years. Asus was number one, so they turned ASRock into the number two guy. Artificial competition owned by a different division (Pegatron), but the same holding company also owns Asus. Same thing with Atari and Kee Games back in the 70's.

All motherboard manufacturers suck these days IMO, some models are good, some aren't, it's a total crapshoot these days.

Also Asus is the only company making good consumer/small business routers these days. Everything else is utter fucking garbage. Yeah Cisco makes SMB routers but the cost is horse shit. I can buy an Asus RT-N66U for $130, flash Shibby Tomato firmware, and get 98% of the featureset. I've done it before, and that model is reliable as fuck too, never ever EVER needs a restart and it tumbled down a flight of stairs, fell HARD on cement, and still works. Tough little bastard.

I don't know any industrial techs who laugh at Asus, and I have a close relationship with a retooling center. HP seems to be the laughing stock, once again.

Quote

For a time, Apple made good hardware but it was expensive, these days... well... I don't got to say anything;

It's pretty terrible, their newer hardware is so sketchy I have very few nice things to say about it. If I want a "Premium" laptop I'll buy a Dell Latitude or an XPS. And that's just what I did. The E7440 is what the Mac Air would be if it wasn't a piece of shit. I lose everything and give up nothing.

[High Treason]

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Tyan and DFI aren't even in business anymore

Incorrect, DFI are still in business, primarily in the industrial sector, they recently unveiled several new products. Tyan are also still around serving as the poor man's SuperO.

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and ASRock hasn't been low end for years. Asus was number one, so they turned ASRock into the number two guy. Artificial competition owned by a different division (Pegatron), but the same holding company also owns Asus. Same thing with Atari and Kee Games back in the 70's.

Explains why they both suck. Sticking with ASRock branded ones as they are cheaper, so the disappointment is less when they don't perform very well.

Quote

Also Asus is the only company making good consumer/small business routers these days. Everything else is utter fucking garbage. Yeah Cisco makes SMB routers but the cost is horse shit. I can buy an Asus RT-N66U for $130, flash Shibby Tomato firmware, and get 98% of the featureset. I've done it before, and that model is reliable as fuck too, never ever EVER needs a restart and it tumbled down a flight of stairs, fell HARD on cement, and still works. Tough little bastard.

The company that invented the term "Gaming router"... -collapses with laughter-... My D-Link laughs in the face of every Asus router owner. For all their flashing blue LEDs, finger print magnet plastic and LCD displays, they have never matched it on sync speed or uptime... If you have to flash custom crap to make it work, it probably isn't any good, I want it to work as advertised out of the box.

Cisco goes on the shitlist for me too though, we were told to install some Cisco stuff where I used to work and they refused to do anything and then refused to let us log back in. They were meant to replace some other Cisco crap that had never worked right. The boss wouldn't let us order Juniper gear but he was pretty clueless so the chief tech guy poured his coke into the top of the cabinet and said the hardware was defective, the boss caved in and we got some lovely Junipers.

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I don't know any industrial techs who laugh at Asus, and I have a close relationship with a retooling center. HP seems to be the laughing stock, once again.

I don't believe you, because you think two of the biggest players in that sector are out of business. HP are the cheaper go-to box for offices, they work and are fairly upgradable, that's about it. As for the industrial systems, you simply can't install a board with the shitty tolerances ASUS specify, people have tried and it simply doesn't work. We don't want stupid colors, overclocking and the power of a Core i7 to run our CNC machine and that's what most of the ASUS money seems to go towards. They pretty much withdrew from that sector over a year ago anyway because it wasn't working out for them, they make a very limited range of high-end products now and really don't seem to bother with it.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Person of Color, on 25 April 2015 - 08:12 PM, said:

AMEN. 3Dfx S-U-C-K-S. Outdated when new, sold completely on speed, Glide, and driver support.

People complain about Nvidia favoritism these days, but they haven't lived through the 3Dfx era where certain games simply wouldn't have 3D acceleration without Glide. EA particularly was in bed with 3Dfx and Glide had unique effects and ran their games better than the competition. Good thing DirectX and OpenGL eventually caught up and they went bankrupt.

[Person of Color]

High Treason, on 25 April 2015 - 10:49 PM, said:

Explains why they both suck. Sticking with ASRock branded ones as they are cheaper, so the disappointment is less when they don't perform very well.

They all suck, but Gigabyte is the worst next to MSI IMO, their UEFI implementations are so buggy it's like they turned to Paris Hilton's crotch for inspiration. I love how my Z77-D3H added "3DMark 2001SE Boost" as an option after I upgraded to the latest UEFI when I bought it.

COULD THERE POSSIBLY BE A MORE IRRELEVANT OPTION?!

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The company that invented the term "Gaming router"... -collapses with laughter-... My D-Link laughs in the face of every Asus router owner. For all their flashing blue LEDs, finger print magnet plastic and LCD displays, they have never matched it on sync speed or uptime... If you have to flash custom crap to make it work, it probably isn't any good, I want it to work as advertised out of the box.

Cisco goes on the shitlist for me too though, we were told to install some Cisco stuff where I used to work and they refused to do anything and then refused to let us log back in. They were meant to replace some other Cisco crap that had never worked right. The boss wouldn't let us order Juniper gear but he was pretty clueless so the chief tech guy poured his coke into the top of the cabinet and said the hardware was defective, the boss caved in and we got some lovely Junipers.

D-Link is very hit or miss, and they don't laugh in the face of every Asus router. Asus open sources all their firmware, which is Linux based, and even ships their routers with utilities that allow third party firmware to be flashed.

If you saw the featureset Shibby Tomato offers you wouldn't be saying that. Even the stock firmware is excellent, not as feature packed, but I've had mine over a year and a half and it hasn't needed a single reboot, save for when my dad stacked it on top of the switch and modem and overheated it.

Asus' firmware is so tight they're able to get the same performance of their competitors with half the clock speed, which is great, because modern routers run too hot. Linus Torvalds uses the RT-N66U.

Cisco products are generally very good but their lower end isn't what it used to be. Juniper is great but I've never actually used them.

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I don't believe you, because you think two of the biggest players in that sector are out of business. HP are the cheaper go-to box for offices, they work and are fairly upgradable, that's about it. As for the industrial systems, you simply can't install a board with the shitty tolerances ASUS specify, people have tried and it simply doesn't work. We don't want stupid colors, overclocking and the power of a Core i7 to run our CNC machine and that's what most of the ASUS money seems to go towards. They pretty much withdrew from that sector over a year ago anyway because it wasn't working out for them, they make a very limited range of high-end products now and really don't seem to bother with it.

CNC is different, I'm talking about other things. You need ultra ruggedized boards for those harsh conditions.

Everyone is going for the colored boards these days.

[Forge]

Person of Color, on 25 April 2015 - 08:12 PM, said:

I see more HP than any other brand, and they cut corners in ways their competitors can only dream of. The G series don't really seem to fail though, just fall the fuck apart when dropped, with the exception of the G60 and the original G6, which are excellent computers.

You might be thinking about the G5, my wife's G6 is an enormous hunk of crap with a shitty screen, a worthless wifi/bluetooth combo realtek wlan card, other generic cheap parts, and a board that was not a year old and in bad need of reflow

[Person of Color]

No, I'm thinking of the G6. There's a thousand different versions of it. The original ones with the first generation i-series CPU's were good.

[Forge]

Okay. That makes sense.

Usual tactic; make a quality product to get a good rep, then start cutting corners and ride the wave until it's time for the next series to go to market. Wash, rinse, repeat.

[Person of Color]

Yeah that's classic HP. I seriously hate how hard that company pushes their shitty netbook CPU laptops and desktops. They're arguably not even useful for web browsing.

[Malgon]

Duke of Hazzard, on 25 April 2015 - 01:02 AM, said:

SLi is a funny thing. When I found out it didn't double your VRAM I thought it was even more pointless than I thought it was before.

Twin-core GPUs tend to be overpriced, too.

I know Nvidia is working on that issue for multiple GPU setups, which I believe will be on the Volta architecture, and I'm fairly sure AMD is working on an implementation as well, although I'm not sure which architecture that will debut on.

[Tea Monster]

ATI Graphics Cards. Nothing the fuck works with them. Even their tech support dosen't know what the latest driver version is.

Gigabyte used to be the watchword for reliability. Not the fastest, but reliable. From what I've seen, that's all changed.

Apple kit was nice. Horrifically overpriced, but nice kit... until they swapped out Nvidia cards for PoS ATI crap on their pro machines. ATI, on a graphics workstation where all the soft is CUDA accelerated? Go forth, procreate, then expire!

[Person of Color]

They're better for gaming though. Nvidia has gone to shit.

[Fox]

[Hendricks266]

[Tea Monster]

I quite liked AMD processors. Intel could always whip them on any kind of benchmark, but for what I used it for, I couldn't really justify spending 3x what I did on the AMD kit to get Intel. It's only since I started using my system for rendering that I actually bit the bullet and went Intel to get dem cycles.

[Inspector Lagomorf]

Yeah, if you want whip-around speed for everyday computer use, the AMD FX-8350 is great and it's cost-effective. For any sort of specialized tasks that really heavily rely on single-threading, Intel's the only way to go.

[Person of Color]

I much prefer the i5 due to it's single threaded performance, but I've used both. The 83xx are great chips.