laconic1

Netgear. I bought a wireless router and wireless card from them a couple of months ago. Biggest mistake I ever made with a tech purchase. The router just doesn't work right, it keeps shitting itself and resetting in the middle of me doing anything on the web. Netgear won't warranty it. When I bought it there was 6 rebates that came with it, four from BestBuy and two from Netgear. Bestbuy honored all their rebates, but Netgear denied their two big rebates totalling fifty dollars since I "didn't send it in on time." The receipt said the rebate had to be postmarked within 30 days of purchase. I mailed it out 18 days after purchase. Netgear never mentioned anything about having to be postmarked by September 14, they just said within 30 days of purchase. I can't stand shady companies like that whose business model is based around screwing customers.

lk_3000

Maxtor hard drive failures. they seem to last 4 years or so. mine, my 2 cousin's each had one fail after 4 years.

vox_rox

I know you were talking about prtinters and such, however my biggest pet peeve about thises guys is when they started shipping their PCs with a restore disc, but no OS discs and no access to drivers, so if you wanted to install something other than what it came with, you could spend hours just getting everything set up.

Restore disc = bad thinking. I bought the computer, give me tools to make it work the way I want, not the way you want me to use.

End of rant.

Peace,

Pierre

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jorgelito

Ugh, I hate Dell. Absolute crap. Poor service, shitty product.

I also hate Microsoft. What I don't understand is how come none of these products ever work right? That's just crazy and ....unAmerican. My XP has crashed way too many times. I've reformatted/reinstalled like 12 times in the past 2 years. All I do is surf the net, use MS Word, very rarely Excel and iTunes. Sometimes Windows Media Player. That's it, no games except Starcraft and Age of Empires. There's no way these applications should be crashing my computer. I am a simple casual user. I don't even know how to do HTML and stuff so it's not like I'm screwing around with the computer. I'm a plug and play guy.

Reading this thread is scary. How can all these companies make products that simply don't work or are shoddy? Isn't that fraud?

jorgelito

Oh yeah,

For all the Toshiba boycotters, add Mitsubishi (and NEC, their subsidiary) to the list too. THopefully none of you are using NEC parts or monitors/flat panels etc.

Those fuckers used "slave", POW labor in death camps to build the engines on their Zeros in WWII and other fucked up shit. They would work them to death and torture them too. The fuckin' Japs make Abu Graib look like Disneyland.

And to top it off, when our boys tried to sue the Japanese, our government sold them out and made it illegal to to sue them. Now that's fucked up. Can you imagine our government making it illegal for Jews to get Holocaust reparations? Unbelievable.

Thanks for the info on Toshiba, I've added them to my Shit List too.

MiSo

AOL = horrible customer service. tried to dispute a bill, and all they did was give 3 free months.... wasn't even enough to cover the cost of the bill. fuckers.

MadCatz products: they make video game accessories. not sure for pc, but for dreamcast,ps2,xbox, etc. they're products are horribly made.

bal8664

OS 9 came out about 6 years ago, around the same time as Windows 98. if you have a problem with windows 98, you know what microsoft says "get windows xp". Both OS 9 and Windows 98 are old, outdated, and unsupported operating systems. I dont fault them at all for saying that.

Dragonlich

Although not really a "tech product"... I won't ever pay money for any of the "Medal of Honor" games. They're nice games; they look great, sound great, play great... for two days. Then you're done, finished. Replay value is pretty much zero, so you might as well throw it away.

If I buy a game, I expect to have at least a few weeks of fun. (Morrowind kept me going for months!).

Hardware: never seem to have had a really bad product.

keyshawn

d-link: bought one of their standard ethernet NICs for my comp. Couldn't get the blasted thing to work in win XP or mandrake 9.0 [this was about a year ago]. So, I called up d-link tech support, contacted some guy with broken english, told me to return the card and get a new one, I did. New card, same issue. Called again, this time they were blaming my CAT5 cable was shoddy for the NIC not working [NOTE: I got some other CAT5 Cable from my friend's dad who's in IT hardware] and it still didn't work.
So, I said screw this, took my 10 dollar loss, bought a linksys card and 15 minutes later, I was on the net on linux and win xp.

Imation I have always ran into trouble with their blank CD's. Lots of errors during burning, plus they flake pretty easily too [the top layer where you write with the sharpie upon flakes off, thus rendering the cd to be useless]

sailor

Not to support their actions, but if you are not going to buy products from a company because they were associated with wartime actions, you are going to have to cross off nearly every company on earth. Yeah, its a shitty thing to do, but boycotting them (and using racial slurs to do it ) because they built stuff for an enemy 60 years ago and used POWs to do it is ridiculous. Might as well also boycott BMW, Mercedes, and all American farming products--all used POW labor to produce things used by one side in that same war. The same thing has been happening for 3000 years... Are you going to boycott all the products ever produced by every company in the world?

Voting with your pocketbook is an excellent thing; doing it for irrational reasons isnt.

__________________
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skaven

My biggest gripe has to be non-Antec power supplies. I've had so much bad luck with all other brands of power supplies (including Enermax, Enlight, etc). The only brand of power supplies I've ever had function for over a year nonstop in a server has been trusty ol' Antec Tru-series power supplies.

Oh yeah, and MS can kiss my ass. I run Slackware.

jorgelito

Ok sailor, you make a good point:

I know what you are saying but I have to think about it a little.

I believe that BMW etc have apologised and paid reparations for their wartime atrocities but the Japanese companies have not. Otherwise I would agree, settle it, move on. But in this case, there has been no closure (at least a satisfactory one).

Also, making a choice to boycott is one of selectivity. For example, if you're vegan or anti-sweatshop, you are going to have one heck of a time trying to get by and stuff. You'll have to basically boycott everyone. But that doesn't mean you can't make a choice and a statment in doing so. Please note, I absolutely understand that companies participate in wartime actions (I would never be able to fly - Boeing, etc *lol*), however, I was trying to make the distinction between those companies and the ones that participated in slave, labor, concentration camps and committed atrocities etc.

Absolutely, you get behind your country in wartime production, but Boeing didn't run death camps etc. That was the differentiaion I was trying to make.

So for me, boycotting company "x" is more symbolic etc and a reflection of my beliefs. Similarly, many Jews indeed boycott Mercedes and Ford even, for their beliefs. More power to them.

I agree with the racial slurs bit; I retract, I got a bit excited. I get really frustrated because I personally see it as an injustice (yes I know life's not fair etc. blah, blah) and an insult to our vets. Two wrongs certainly do not make a right and I definitely don't want to participate in spreading ignorance or blind hatred.

I still hate Microsoft and Dell though...

Homey_V

Gigabyte. A buddy of mine had a top of the line Gigabyte board with dual power regulation systems hooked up to a ups. Guess what killed it? A power surge from within the power regulator that plugged INTO THE BOARD!
Scratch ever buying a gigabyte product.
D-Link
ECS
And a few others that dont come to mind right now.

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MontanaXVI

Gotta say I cannot stand HP/Compaq

Musicmatch and Real are both up there too.

MM used to be kinda ok now it is a bloated piece of shit. Same with Real

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bal8664

Long live winamp 2.81!

Pragma

Here are things I won't buy/use/touch with someone else's 10-foot pole:

Compaq desktops (I love the Compaq/HP Proliant servers), Dell anything, Gateway anything, Real anything, Lindows/Linspire, ATi (too many bad experiences with various ATi products), and hrm. That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

Glava

You might want to add anything made in Mexico and UK too. We fought them too, you know.

shadowalker

Brass eagle(for you painball players) Will keep my rainmaker version 1

Any MMORPG from SOE *after seeing how thay fuged up SWG* Was a great game and concept then thay decided to let it go and start on EQ2 and forget about us.

Thermaltake cooling products.

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littlebighead

HP/Compaq for crappy desktop machines. Compaq has always made crap as long as I can remember (remember bigfoot drives?), and HP has inherited the crappiness.

Dell desktops are okay, but Dell laptops keep dying at my company. But I don't know if it's just Dell, because we only buy Dell.

All D-Link products have been crappy to me. You get what you pay for.

Iomega for their crappy Zip drives.

And Microsoft. I'm forced to use their crap at work.

bendsley

You obviously have never seen a kernel segmentation fault. Don't get me wrong, I use linux and love it, but it has its drawbacks too sometimes. Yes, it can crash, and it can be a hard one.

Alternative for photoshop in Linux is GIMP.

Blender is out there for 3D stuff should you need it. There are several well supported packages for video editing instead of premiere. Go check out sourceforge.net
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Why is it that so many people hate Microsoft? Just because other people do and now you can too? I ask because I use products where I work that are made by Microsoft (Office 2003 suite, Windows Server 2003, Exchange, Navision, etc.) I also use linux as our smtp proxy (spam filter), network monitoring system, and my personal bitch computer (currently running protien folding for TFP.) MS actually does make some decent products. You can't condemn the whole company for one product you may not like. And I am willing to be that MS has never actually done anything wrong to you.

Somewhere up above I was seeing someone bashing IBM because of a drive that went bad. The DeskStar (deathstar) drives were awful, and I bought one, and it went bad. But, I still continue to purchase IBM products. I have the faith. No matter what brand of harddrives you buy, it is easily possible for it to die. IBM makes solid products, especially their thinkpads and blade systems.

OK, on to HP. The only thing I buy from HP are the printers. They are good. Period. They have the largest market share, and it continues to hold. We use both consumer and corporate style printers where I work and most of them work flawlessly. We put a lot of use into these printers, rarely an issue. If an issue arises, I don't write off HP because one of their products had issues. I get over it and move on.

And Compaq? Well, I have seen too many of their consumer products fail. When I was younger, I worked as a service tech at Best Buy, and Best Buy is a major seller of Compaq computers (before HP takeover). Well, all I can say is that they return more Compaqs than anything, for actual return or service. The consumer products seem awful. However, their server equipment is quite good. I'm talking about the ProLiant lines and whatnot.

Dell: Someone mentioned issues with Dell above. Did you have more than one bad experience? We use all OptiPlex machines where I work and PowerEdge's for servers. They run good. There service has always been top notch for us (of course we pay for service as well). We had a Dell PowerVault go bad one afternoon (for those who don't know, the PowerVaults are multi-tape backup systems). We called about 0825 that morning and Dell had one flown from OK City, OK to here and we had it about 2pm. Thats pretty good in my opinion.

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aa1037

After working last summer as a tech at Best Buy, I have to say that the best available comps in the store are emachines. They made a HUGE turnaround when Gateway bought them. I think they were the only machines sold in BBY that didn't use proprietary parts. We got those back for hardware failures less than any other brand.

Then again, most of the problems at ANY tech center right now revolve around spyware, which doesn't care too much what brand PC you are using

alarment13

i don't buy ibm hard drives, mine died along with the drives of 3 of my friends (who all bought them together).

whiplash13

Maxtor Hardrives. I built 4 PC's with them in them and all 4 drives failed. Will never buy Maxtor again. I have used hundreds of WD's since then w/o one failure. Using Seagates as well now, still no failures.