I’ve never had a pre-built desktop, but the best computer was probably the 286 we got when I was 13ish that just went forever.
The worst, hands-down, was the only Celeron I ever owned. I had it about six weeks in early 1999, but it made a huge impact for all the wrong reasons. Upgraded to a Pentium III 500 and never looked back.
For my worst, it was a (1996?) Mac Performa. I can’t remember the model number, but it was a sad, little machine I couldn’t wait to get rid of.
My best is the machine I’m on now: a dual 6-core (12-core / 24 hyper-threaded) 2.93 GHz Intel Xeon Mac Pro, with 16 GBs of ram and a sizzling video card. Makes doing CG work a dream.
My first computer was a KayPro II, an awesome luggable computer, for its day. I had the WordStarword processor, and some ASCII games, including a resource management game called something like Space Trader, or something like that.
Yup. The Amiga series were truly great computers. And they were very, very popular - at least in Europe. The demise of Commodore has everything to do with bad business sense and very little with lack of costumers. A real shame - I really, really liked all the different Amigas I had back then.
ETA: Worst system? Probably the frankenputer I built from leftovers from various friends’ hw upgrades. I wrote my thesis on it but apart from that it did me no good at all.
For me it’s my newest purchase, 13" Macbook Air. It’s a very quick machine, boots up in about 5 seconds and is better than the various Compaq, Dell, and Toshibas I’ve had in the past.
Only mildly related, but everytime I reboot and wait for Windows7 to kick in, I remember the contests of a decade ago that I and my roommates used to have. We all had different operating systems, and we’d time how long it took for a complete reboot into Windows <95, 98, 2000, Millenium>. For the life of me I can’t remember who ever won those things, but none of them took half the time it does now.
Of course, Windows also wasn’t warming up a jillion different subroutines, so we basically booted up the shell, and turned anything else we wanted on when we WANTED it on.
That probably helped.
Best: early 2006 17" intel iMac (still using it). Great computer.
Runner up: Pentium II (I think) Gateway bought in the mid-late 90’s. That was an awesome computer for the time.
Worst: tie between a Dell Insprion laptop bought in about 2001 (shoddy build quality, thoroughly mediocre performance, and then the motherboard died) and a cheapo Dell desktop (bought in about 2004) which was a total POS from day 1.