Bought a Sound Blaster 16 when I was a kid. I could get a nice ESS Audiodrive for under half of that. But I was an idiot. Come on dude for a 486SX33 computer to play DOS games. 😵

A bunch of mid-range GPUs-

My first disappointment was the S3 Virge, it accelerated nothing and deaccelerated my favorite game Descent 2. I switched to Rendition Verite 2100 and was super impressed.

With my P2-400, I went from Voodoo Banshee to Voodoo3 and saw basically no benefit Geforce2MX was light years better.

Some more along the way- Radeon 9550, HD4850.

The only cpu I really regretted was Phenom 9850. I went from an Athlon x2 4200+ to a Phenom 9850 in an era where quad cores weren’t well utilized. It felt like a total side-grade. Within 3months, I switched to a Q6600 and was blown away.

My first modern build (for the time) in general kinda was. It had some crap power supply, Pentium G4400, and an R7 250X. None of these things were bad per se (except the PSU, replaced that quick) but I could have gotten much better bang for my buck. Also, when I got my G4400, the G4560 came out like 3 months later.

I also regretted my first laptop I bought with my own money. It was a dell, with an i7 26something quad core, but hampered by the GT 525M graphics I overpaid for. The laptop after that also was a bit regrettable. I got a Lenovo Y510P. Again, it wasn’t bad, but I picked a 750M SLI over a GTX 765M equipped Sager, I believe. SLI was on its way out in 2014, and this thing also only had a hard drive. My next laptop had a 1060, and SSD. It felt like computing at the speed of light compared to what I was used to up until that point.

Seagate FireCuda 2TB SSHD.

Yeah, these things were definitely not worth using and their performance claims were definitely overblown. Basically, a standard HDD with an SSD cache.

At the time, Seagate claimed they were an"affordable alternative that delivers the speed of solid state memory with the storage benefits of an HDD". The SSD portion would store commonly accessed files for fast access, while less accessed files stayed on the HDD. The problem was they were heavily marketed for gamers but had little to no impact on game load times or drive access performance. They came with 8GB of MLC NAND for the SSD portion, and in most games where faster file access would have been beneficial, 8GB was simply not enough space and you saw no benefits.

They also boasted faster boot times, but sadly, even here, at best you shaved off a couple seconds. Not worth the price.

I get it, they were a stopgap in a time when SSD's were still expensive, but you were better off saving your money getting a good HDD, or saving up for a real SSD.

When my just-out-of warranty Geforce Ti4400 started artifacting in what must have been early 2004, I thought I'd 'upgrade' to the next generation and replaced it with an FX5700LE. That was a major disappointment, but at least it was fairly cheap. I put up with it for maybe a year, then bought a 6600GT which proved to be a vastly better experience.

More generally, upgrading my systems far too regularly (12-18mths on average from the mid 90's through to the 2010's) rather than waiting for them or specific components to struggle with whatever I was doing (coding) or playing, and particularly all the fans, cases etc trying to get a quieter system...

Specifically, I always did a ton of research before buying so there's not been too many duff buys. One though was the ATI 9800 I bought that came with HL2 - horribly loud and power hungry, died within the first year and one of the few bits of hardware I've ever had to RMA (great game though!). Eventually replaced with a 6600GT which was infinitely quieter and generally gave much better/consistent frame rates in most titles.

Athlon x2 5600+ with a DFI NF590SLIM2R motherboard - never could get the motherboard fans to be quiet, and the performance overall was just underwhelming, althought that could have also been from running Vista on it. Replaced with a Q6600 running Win7 on an SSD which was like night and day.

Also used to have a tendency to buy the latest graphics cards just for x feature which I'd rarely get round to coding much with and by the time most games used it I'd be looking at the next upgrade anyway for the next big thing... but at least most games performed well from the constant upgrades I guess.

Steve Jobs Quotes:
“Build the Best Computer and Don’t Settle for Anything Less”
“Good Peoples want to work with the Best because working with the Best Help to Make you Better”
“We Don’t Ship JUNK”

I would say “Don’t be LAZY“
Do your research when putting togeather computer components
Inexpensive component can perform just as good as inexpensive components
It has allot to do about you Bios configuration and Operating System installation too.
Choosing the Right Drivers , Software and Games.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2025-03-21, 08:57:

...

Just shut up would you?

A MSI SuprimX 3080ti ..never really got to use it before it got replaced by a 4090 which is a substantially better card at roughly the same price, I feel the whole 30 series was a waste of time.

To add to that the SuprimX 3080Ti has UEFI issues that MSI simply refuses to fix along with dual bios corruption that causes the primary bios to get corrupted and unable to be reflashed forcing you to use the quite mode bios which gimps the cards performance.

MSI truly suck with their hardware support, I bought a MSI MAG X870 Tomahawk motherboard and it has had a ~dozen bios updates in the last 4-6 months to rectify DDR5 compatibility issues, not all of them official either but beta versions released on their forums. Not sure what the hell is going on with their bios dev team but they need to get their shit together.

-went through 3 kits of DDR 5 on that board to find set that works at rated 6000 EXPO speeds, I eventually found a set of Gskill that works and I can even run a full 128Gb 4x32 of it at 5800Mt which it what it has now. Anyone who has tried to get 4 sticks working on AM5 will know its not fond of doing so and will usually lock you to 4800Mt if it does run.

3770k and 4770k. These CPUs sucked ass one more than the other and were a totally marginal upgrade in front of any 2600k overclocked to 5ghz.

subhuman@xgtx wrote on 2025-03-21, 12:06:

3770k and 4770k. These CPUs sucked ass one more than the other and were a totally marginal upgrade in front of any 2600k overclocked to 5ghz.

I owned a 4790K and still do, its a solid work horse CPU and was an upgrade for my 2700K Rig, I dont regret the purchase of either CPU both were solid buys !. I will say the 4790K did earn its name Devils Canyon, it did run hot but had the grunt to back that heat up with enough head room left to push it further. (My 2700K ran at 5.2 Ghz from day one and never once skipped a beat, best CPU purchase ever)

I did hear the only reason to ever get a 3770K was for PCIe 3.0 support which ... uhh wasn't need for anything at the time. The 4770K was just a stinker .. ran stupidly hot and wasn't much better than the 2600K and couldnt be overclocked without some serious cooling.

I don't think i ever bought anything i really wish i hadn't but maybe there is some hindsight realisations

I did go through a short phase of buying a fair amount of middling circa 2010 stuff 2-3 years back and while it all works ok, i have ended up with several PCs worth of essentially duplicate tech. It was all very cheap, but maybe it will still end up somewhat a waste, i only use a small portion of it.

Many years ago i bought an expensive boxed retail modem in haste when i should have been patient and ordered on from a magazine (this was long ago 😀 ) Not only that but the modem was troublesome and in the end damaged the motherboard!

I bought an iomega zip 100 with the parallel port connector and really only used it to back up some games and act as a kind of 100mb at a time back up for things taking up too much room on my then 800mb hard drive, i didn't use it much. I thought of it as a waste of money for a while, especailly as not so long after larger HDDs and cd burners became more affordable, but now i dont mind, its kind of nostalgic - and it still works too!

I used to spend more than i needed to at times, through ignorance and impatience. I then learned the art of waiting and realising it doesn't matter to wait a while, nothing is being missed

I kinda wished I waited for new Radeon D3D11 GPUs to come out when I bought a Radeon HD 4890. Couple of years later, I bought another GPU in 2014, this time NVIDIA. Ever since buying my first computer, I'm always one major Direct3D version behind.

I paid Rs13K (around 200USD) back in 2018 for 16GB ram. I think I could've waited for the 8GB 2nd kit for the prices to come down

I bought an Asus U3S6 thinking that THAT would be THE upgrade for my SE7527RP2 based dual Irwindale system.

It is a pci express 4x card that provides 2x sata3 and 2x usb3 ports.

It would have been great in theory, except., when I plug it in with drives connected to it, the bios screen hangs and flashes randomly coloured and flashing garbage characters on a 80x25 text mode when it should be detecting drives. I replaced it and the next one did the same. Luckily I was able to get a refund.

Turns out that card was a piece of errata for some specific asus motherboard that bled too much past being bleeding edge and could not provide the promised features, so an addon card was made specifically for that thing. Apparently compatibility with anything else was not a consideration.

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2025-03-25, 12:53:

I paid Rs13K (around 200USD) back in 2018 for 16GB ram. I think I could've waited for the 8GB 2nd kit for the prices to come down

Waiting is great 😀 Once you start waiting you soon become used to being "behind" the market, and buying everything very cheap and sometimes even used. It's kind of freeing really. I always remind myself, as example, that folk were doing amazing things with PCs ten years ago and am i really going to do something beyond what they did? Obviously if you are then the you need later things, and if you really really want to play a new game with max settings then you may have to spend more, but always question yourself first.

Regrettable hardware is less regrettable if its very cheap!*

*unless it breaks something more valuable!

I regret buying two Sound Blaster Live!s.

The first card was actually dead on arrival; I eventually grabbed a second one, hoping it would improve my machines' OS compatibility.

This turned out to be a huge mistake. While the Windows 2000/XP drivers installed fine, the "Windows 9x" package complained that it needed Windows 98 SE. I was stunned, as 1. the chipset came out in 1998 and 2. the Live! is supposed to be compatible with Windows 95.

I decided to install the drivers on Windows NT 4.0 – another OS that should have been supported. I initially got a strange error message, after which the setup program silently failed. It turned out I had run out of space on the system partition; while 500 MB should have been more than enough for the OS and drivers, my pagefile had eaten the rest of it.

I rather reluctantly got rid of the pagefile and carried on. The drivers seemed to install properly; I rebooted, only to get no audio. After ruling out any connection issues, I checked \winnt\system32\drivers and found that the setup program didn't actually drop any files onto the system... even though I had explicitly checked the Windows Drivers box during installation. Sigh.

I copied every .sys file in the package to the aforementioned directory, then wrote registry entries for each. While the files did load, I still didn't hear any sound from the card.

At this point, I gave up and plugged in my Avance Logic ALS4000. All of a sudden, I had functioning audio not only on Windows 3.1 through XP, but also in DOS – that's right, this card is Sound Blaster-compatible.

Creative are the only company I can think of who would release two cards in the same series with varying degrees of OS compatibility. I won't be buying another one of their products. In fact, I recently ditched my X-Fi, since the driver CD is useless on Windows 11, while Creative want me to sell my soul to SatanGoogle in order to download newer drivers. The card I replaced it with works on Windows 2000 through 11.

Sometime around late '03 I wanted to play NFS Underground and Halo PC but felt like I was held back by my GF3 Ti200. I remember watching The Screen Savers or some other TechTV program that was raving over the Radeon 9600 Pro being the best bang-for-your-buck GPU at the time. Later that week my mom or dad drove me over to the local Best Buy to pick out the new card while they went to look for some new movies or a new appliance or something. This is how my thought process went that day:

"Hmm, what was that card called? Radio 9600 something? I wish I wrote the name down before coming here."
"Ohh, this must be it! Yeah, the price ain't that bad either."
"Alright! Can't wait to try out my brand new Radeon 9600 SE!"
🤦‍♂️

I'm normally quite careful before buying some hardware so I don't have many regrets.
But I do have moments of poor judgement since I'm not perfect. Such a moment was a long time ago, when I decided to upgrade from a socket 939 single core Sempron to something newer.
Well, I thought that a Sempron 2650 (AM1 socket at 1.45 GHz) would be a good idea despite of its lower frequency, having a much newer architecture, being dual-core, etc, so I bought it - and a new motherboard for it.
And let's say that my thought was wrong is an understatement. That thing was a straight up downgrade from the old Sempron.
Everything ran slower than on the old 939 system. It was so bad that I scrambled to buy anything that was better than it. And I tossed this thing and its motherboard somewhere out of sight and tried hard to forget everything about it.

But I still have it, perhaps I will use it for some experiments in XP.

GemCookie wrote:

I recently ditched my X-Fi, since the driver CD is useless on Windows 11, while Creative want me to sell my soul to SatanGoogle in order to download newer drivers.

Can you explain that part?