I’ve had dozens of computers over the years at home and work, including refurbished ones. The only one that I was not satisfied with was a brand new Gateway computer. It was a lemon, right out of the box. A tech came out and replaced the power supply. A few days later another tech came and replace the motherboard(?). A few days after that, another tech replaced the power supply and the motherboard.
Each new Gateway tech trash talked the previous tech. Eventually, a Gateway tech brought out a new computer. I replaced that one as soon as a new version of Windows was released. I’ve never dealt with Gateway again.
The only two pre-assembled I’ve had real problems with was a Compaq notebook I bought about 12 years ago, and an HP desktop I bought a few years before that. I also had power supply problems with a computer I built.
In the 21st century it’s been plain sailing. I buy HPs; my wife recently switched to a MacBook Pro and is very happy with it so far.
The Amiga. It was so long ago that I can’t even remember the version I had, I think it was the 500. If only it had caught on and had the support it needed. Sigh.
I was going to say that. The IBM PCjr was easily the worst I ever had. Was underpowered when it came out. It didn’t improve at all over the following 4-5 years.
Most: A “Leading Edge” 486DX /33MHz box. I was able to keep it up to date for over a decade.
Best: PC that I built myself and upgraded repeatedly over the years. Last configuration included Win7 and it was by far the best PC I’ve ever used. Hardware was to my specifications and Win7 was fantastic. Finally a Microsoft OS that “just worked”.
Worst: 27in iMac purchased a few months ago. Total piece of garbage wrapped in a very pretty screen. Nothing “just works”, constant problems and failures, I completely and totally hate it.
My “Most Fun” computer was my first IBM PC-XT clone. It had a screaming fast 10 MHz processor, a whopping 1024k of RAM and an EGA monitor. I never came close to filling the 20 MB hard drive.
Absolutely crap by even 20 year old standards, but unbeatable for the sense of discovery that came with finding out how to go to a computer store and buy a thing called a UART to expand the serial card so I could plug in an external modem, then pick up the phone, dial a number, listen for the tone, press the “connect” button on the modem and carefully hang up the phone, hit Return a couple times to clear the garbage caused by hanging up the phone and then seeing a login screen of some distant BBS. In 1983, this was sheer magic, if not sorcery.
Today, we go around the world without the slightest thought to the process, and two photos taken with my DSLR would overwhelm that drive.
Worst computer has to be a Dell Dimension that I bought somewhere around 1999. It arrived damaged, took several tries before Dell could ship out undamaged parts and its performance never lived up to its pricey claims.
I’ve had family members and co-workers approach me with enough dead eMachines and Packard Bells that I feel able to loathe them by proxy.
Best computer so far is this iMac. (One of the first Intel models from 2005 or so.) Despite needing a new hard drive a few months ago, it’s been trouble-free, speedy and pretty much care-free. Truthfully, it’s the first that I’ve not felt the itch to upgrade some part or another after 10 months or so.
I’ve owned countless Macs since 1985.
In terms of Pure User Experience, my Mac 512K was the best machine I’ve ever owned. Even though it was tiny, monochrome, and had only two floppy drives, it was still a magical machine.
I currently have a 5+ year old Quad-processor G5. It’s perfectly satisfactory for everything I do, but the writing is on the wall, since it won’t run anything past Leopard, and more and more software is being written for intel-only.
I’m posting this from my 2006 MacBook. It’s also fast enough for everything I do. I keep thinking it would be nice to get a shiny new MacBook, but I just can’t justify it, when this one works so well.
Actually mine held up pretty well against the PC’s of the day (but didn’t do so well against the next generation of XT/AT’s.) It was a tad slower but with the native EGA graphics certain programs really shined, e.g. the King’s Quest series. I wouldn’t say it was the worst, but maybe 5th from the bottom.
I’ve had a bunch of machines, the last few Dell workstations. My current computer is a quad core with 8 gigs of ram booting Windows 7 off an SSD that I built maybe five months ago. It’s by far the most satisfying machine I’ve owned. I love rebooting in less than 30 seconds.
I was planning to upgrade to 16 gigs of ram a month after I built it, but I haven’t had any trouble with the eight so I put if off. The machine runs the design programs I need it to flawlessly and is otherwise very sexy.
My least impressive machine was a Gateway that I had maybe ten years ago. Everything about that machine was garbage, the case was designed by an idiot, it was running Windows 98, it struggled to run Photoshop, ugh, just crappy.
Yours too? Ha! Eh, it worked well enough, I could play King’s Quest on it. The PS/250z was a pain, but I babied that all the way through Windows 3.11.
I can’t think of a computer that gave unsatisfactory performance to me. Because I fixed them all. My current beast, though, is four years old, still faster than some of the new models, and the most stable thing I’ve ever owned, with six month uptimes while playing beta video games.
Worst: a 286 hand-me-down that took five minutes to boot windows, and had a 20MB hard drive that kept crashing. It and my 486 after that are the only hard drives I’ve ever had that crashed. Oddly, both still work to this day once I reformatted them.
Best: my new netbook. It’s running the same OS as my desktop, on a slower processor and worse graphics card, and yet is more efficient and starts up much more quickly. It even has equal performance on the same graphics settings in the new BTTF game, despite the graphics card being an Intel GMA.
It took me longer than it should have, with me wondering if you posted into the wrong thread. But, once I got it, I giggled.
I bought a high-end Dell a few years back. Maxed out everything that could be maxed out, spent a lot of money. The mother board died 13 months after purchase. One month out of warranty.
I paid to replace it and that died within a year.
I will never buy another Dell anything. I won’t even use the printer I have of theirs, because I won’t buy ink from the bastards.
A techno dilettante friend put a computer together for me 5 years ago, the thing never really worked right. I’m not completely helpless when it comes to computers but something would go wrong and every two weeks or so he’d come over to help fix whatever new thing cropped up. The fan was loud almost immediately and while the hardware was good I always suspected there was a bottleneck somewhere really limiting its potential. Eventually I got sick of calling him and hired a professional to look at it, but even then it was marginal at best.
A bad waste of $800, and scared me completely off of putting together a new one for myself.
A year ago I dropped $700 on a rig at TigerDirect and never looked back.
Huh, my family had a PCjr too, the last iteration before they canceled the product. I had the worst luck finding games that worked on it.
We bought a memory expansion module (jrHotShot) for it that may have made it even more non-compatible to mainline PCs.
As it was, it was great for playing BASIC games and its probably the reason I’m a programmer now.
Solid as a rock though…it worked from Christmas 1984 through my senior year of high school in 1992 and I don’t recall us ever having to take it to a shop. My graduation present was a IBM PS-1, the first computer with a hard disk I ever owned (PC-DOS 6/Windows 3.0).
The PS-1 wasn’t quite as solid as the jr, I think it suffered wear-and-tear from being lugged repeatedly from home to dorm room and back. Had to replace the monitor at one point (an IBM specific design feature meant I couldn’t get just any replacement monitor) and it ended up not quite making it all the way through college as my primary computer (though it never completely died). I finished college with a junky but solid generic box that I got as a hand-me-down from the office where I worked in the summer (it was free, I couldn’t complain much).
My worst computer was a tie between a late 90s no-name .com machine that died not long after the warranty expired and all the computers I built myself out of parts from Fry’s.
I have no complaints about Dell. My current Dell desktop is going on five years old and getting creaky but still solid. The previous Dell desktop I had lasted about as long and the only thing that went wrong there was the 2nd hard drive went bad. I have a Dell laptop that has been great, but is less than a year old at the moment.
Most fun for tinkering: Atari-800 (6502 machine) with the processor bus exposed by cutting open the substantial (1/8" thick!!!) aluminum shield at the back. Programmed in Assembler, and used for many electronics projects.
Best performance, typical home use (Gaming, photo’s, etc): Pretty much anything I’ve built myself from components, though I did have a very nice and relatively inexpensive Systemax PC for several years that worked fine.
Worst in just about every respect: Anything by HP/Compaq. Non-standard cases, loaded with crapware, slower then any other equivalent machine I ever used. I’ve had 3 of those total in the past.
Average, gets the job done, but generally doesn’t excite me: Dell, the last 5 years or maybe a bit more (after they stopped with the “Dell Proprietary Components”).
Been through a lot of computers in my 15 yrs of computing. All the macs met needs (created standards). Jumped to Windows 3.1 and again set the standards for computing. I have never been too upset with any computer except back in the days of dial up. If only monitors could bruise!!!
Least favorite = I haven’t had a lasting good experience with dells
Most satisfactory - gateway 2000 & my eMachines t3120 i bought back in 06 that hasnt had a problem to this day although i quit using it because I just built a new gaming computer. But it looks & runs as good as the day I bought it, stickers and all…
I am not blessed with an overabundance of knowledge of things electronic. I did my reading and decided to buy an HP laptop. While I was at the store I bought a Toshiba because the screen was much clearer and it was way cuter than the dorky looking HP. I LOVE IT! Its faster than slick snot! I’ve had it for over a year now and Its still better than any others Ive seen.
My worst is a dell desk top. My husband still uses it. I have no idea why. Its not like he’s getting extra points to fight with the thing.