Worst computer hardware feature you have seen?

Easy enough
ralphbsz said:
Why does this forum only have thumbs up and shaking hands, and not a ROFL emoji?
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I assumed it is because the furum administrators are not amused.

Easy to poke at bad/annoying designs like removing the hard drive LED, keyboard status LEDs, removing keyboard keys (pause/break, scroll lock, etc.). Some things are a funny bad like Sony (re)writeable CDs that don't work in Sony writers. Touchpads with the clickable button under a touch sensitive surface that registers pointer movement when you try to press it down for a click could have been at best annoying and performance limited but in every implementation I have seen it was just bad. I was bothered by USB having a directional plug normally with no clear index marker short of looking at both ends being attached from my first time seeing it in the 90s. I also learned to say USB meant 'unusually slow bus' because it literally lagged the whole computer with the first devices and ports I saw that tried to use it; think it lagged when connected by may have been limited to when in use. Felt bad for cable modem users who used USB because their computer didn't have an ethernet port to connect the modem to; USB from modem or from a USB to ethernet adapter usually bottlenected the connection and the USB controllers usually offleaded ther engineering to your CPU + software so the computer slowed down when using it. Wasn't that the same idea about complaining about 'winmodems'?

Selling a product as the same model but downgrading its specifications should be unacceptable; all reviews and discussions of the product now no longer apply. SSDs come to mind but memory and other components have gone down this route from some manufacturers. Not listing product specifications isn't an acceptable alternative.

Selling products that don't meet the advertised specifications. My gigiabit Linksys router pushes about 250Mb or about 500Mb if I don't mind regular instability and I had to replace the firmware with ddwrt to even get it to talk to some of my networking equipment. My cable modem clams to support 10Gb but only has tow 1Gb ports to connect to it; even if I could bond them into one thats still only 20% of the advertised speed. USB thumbdrives advertised as USB3's 5Gbps speed when they transfor at a peak of no more than 60Mbps (slower if not sequential or writing instead of reading) so about 4-8 times slower than a max performance USB2 drive. Best trick I know to quickly sort out drives is ignore the protocol specification #s (false advertising loves to target these) and if they didn't mention a specification then its because it is bad at that specification; good drives brag about actual bytes per second read and write throughput (even if it is optimal conditions) as long as each # is a high one.

For repairability, proprietary is annoying but high priced proprietary compared to competition without any benefit and when it didn't come first is worse. Removing screws for plastic clips that break is better than screws hidden behind adhesive that fails enough without needing to tamper with it like laptops that put screws under the feet which now need removing for basic maintenance like cleaning the cooling system and replacing the battery (=consumable). replacing those with glue is worse and permanently welding the seams is worse yet. Such design logic goes down the route of "if the ashtray is full, buy a new car" which I prefer to keep far away from any products I buy. Lack of serviceability due to parts intentionally not being available comes next. Lack of serviceability by designs like glue (and worse) holding parts, removing sockets / soldering socketable components (not an issue? tell that to 13th/14th gen Intel owners when the proper fix is not sold as resoldering a new CPU to the motherboard), coating parts for reasons other than environmental isolation/protection and mechanical stability, and scraping labels off of labeled components. Not silkscreening boards and not offering schematics. Not sure where to fit it but proprietary keying of parts needs to go in here somewhere. Proprietary+abandoned makes its own fun category as that leads to being planned e-waste production.

Making batteries not removable, placed inside the computer, not easily accessible when things are so glitched that you need to remove all power to fix it (wait for battery to die, open it and unplug if not soldered ('usually' isn't soldered). Some knew it was an issue and gave a paperclip hole to press a 'disconnect battery' switch. If your computer got wet (and wasn't designed to resist liquid damage which most aren't), good luck not causing further damage by keeping power available/applied.

Designs that are built to fail, whether intentionally or by mistake (less bad but companies should stand by their products even during engineering/production faults). Apple has had a history of them with some being partial consumer victories (sometimes excluded some impacted customers) in lawsuits. Other companies have had voluntary and involuntary recalls over actual safety issues. Its best if companies wouldn't let it get to that point but also bad because the non-safety defects often require a lawsuit to resolve.

You can collect all those bad designs into one if you buy a (I think it is often called) netbook. During Win10 days that I saw them they normally had a soldered 32GB (28.5-ish before you start partitioning) solid state drive that performed like a "slow" mechanical drive. Had customers come into my old work wanting to upgrade it to something faster/bigger/etc. but the average design was intentionally not upgradeable. Options were external USB storage (time to bring up lack of USB>2.0?) or SSD card; both of which were sometimes not a bootable choice. If an upgrade "want" is a luxury to you, these same computers would come up with an error message once put online because at no choice to the user it would download Windows updates but even with no software/files added by the user it fails to install due to lack of hard drive space so more space is not just a want. I managed to use a series of cleanup+compress steps that got over 20GB free (16GB if I couldn't do a clean install) initially with updates completed but the last I tried a few years ago it was down to around 10GB free on a fresh install. No manufacturer had instructions that I could find or heard of guiding a user through how to have enough space for the updates though some updates could be worked around by uninstalling some manufacturer bloat and using a not-included USB drive to let Windows store its rollback state externally (thought they removed that option fairly quick though). So its not 'a' feature but I'd say it wins the category for worst computer hardware since it can fail within hours of unboxing + starting to use and the manufacturer had no solution. Boycotting a manufacturer over this design doesn't help; every major player sold them.

...or maybe I am too picky?
 
Mirror176 said:
You can collect all those bad designs into one if you buy a (I think it is often called) netbook. During Win10 days that I saw them they normally had a soldered 32GB (28.5-ish before you start partitioning) solid state drive that performed like a "slow" mechanical drive. Had customers come into my old work wanting to upgrade it to something faster/bigger/etc. but the average design was intentionally not upgradeable. Options were external USB storage (time to bring up lack of USB>2.0?) or SSD card; both of which were sometimes not a bootable choice. If an upgrade "want" is a luxury to you, these same computers would come up with an error message once put online because at no choice to the user it would download Windows updates but even with no software/files added by the user it fails to install due to lack of hard drive space so more space is not just a want. I managed to use a series of cleanup+compress steps that got over 20GB free (16GB if I couldn't do a clean install) initially with updates completed but the last I tried a few years ago it was down to around 10GB free on a fresh install. No manufacturer had instructions that I could find or heard of guiding a user through how to have enough space for the updates though some updates could be worked around by uninstalling some manufacturer bloat and using a not-included USB drive to let Windows store its rollback state externally (thought they removed that option fairly quick though). So its not 'a' feature but I'd say it wins the category for worst computer hardware since it can fail within hours of unboxing + starting to use and the manufacturer had no solution. Boycotting a manufacturer over this design doesn't help; every major player sold them.

...or maybe I am too picky?
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This really reminds me of the Asus EE PC laptop. back in the day. But since then, Asus got its act together, and makes some pretty decent hardware.
 
Mirror176 said:
I was bothered by USB having a directional plug normally with no clear index marker short of looking at both ends being attached from my first time seeing it in the 90s.
Click to expand...
Old joke: USB plugs have three orientations, the one you try first, the one after you flip it over 180 degrees, and the one that finally fits (and is neither of the other two).

We live near Silicon Valley, on a large forested property. The land was owned by an old-timer engineer, who was quite a hippie. He legally changed his name several times; All his names are very funny, so much so that I can go to the county building department and mention "I live on the land of Earthworm", and they'll know. Turns out he was one of the fathers of USB, and finished his career by moving to Seattle (when California stopped being cool and hip enough), and was in charge of USB firmware in Redmond. But in reality he is an amateur rock musician with a day job. His greatest accomplishment was: he was the opening act for The Rolling Stones once.

cracauer@ said:
Just wish they did decent service in the US, too.
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Slightly sexy anecdote from the late 1990s. I was using one of the original Toshiba laptops, about 5cm thick, with a 640x480 screen, at work. The ergonomics and battery life were awful, but it allowed carrying my "development machine" into a wafer fab. Then the screen failed. I made phone calls, and the nearest repair shop was about an hour by car away. So one afternoon I drove over there to drop it off; by coincidence, it was Halloween. There was a charming young lady at the front desk, she took the laptop and brought it to the lab in the back. A little while later she came back: the good news is that they have the replacement part in stock, but it will take about 1-1/2 to 2 hours. I decided to wait for it to get done, to avoid yet another multi-hour drive. So at 5pm they look the doors, and I'm sitting in the back corner of the waiting room with a newspaper. Then another young lady came from the back, and started talking to the receptionist about Halloween costumes for the party that evening. Since they had forgotten that I was sitting in the corner, they tried on their costumes (!), which required taking their clothes off (!!). I tried to be as quiet as possible and not look, since I didn't want to get arrested. Fortunately, a little later the (male and fully dressed) repair tech came by and gave me the laptop back, and I left, before any embarrassing thing happened.
 
ralphbsz said:
Old joke: USB plugs have three orientations, the one you try first, the one after you flip it over 180 degrees, and the one that finally fits (and is neither of the other two).

We live near Silicon Valley, on a large forested property. The land was owned by an old-timer engineer, who was quite a hippie. He legally changed his name several times; All his names are very funny, so much so that I can go to the county building department and mention "I live on the land of Earthworm", and they'll know. Turns out he was one of the fathers of USB, and finished his career by moving to Seattle (when California stopped being cool and hip enough), and was in charge of USB firmware in Redmond. But in reality he is an amateur rock musician with a day job. His greatest accomplishment was: he was the opening act for The Rolling Stones once.



Slightly sexy anecdote from the late 1990s. I was using one of the original Toshiba laptops, about 5cm thick, with a 640x480 screen, at work. The ergonomics and battery life were awful, but it allowed carrying my "development machine" into a wafer fab. Then the screen failed. I made phone calls, and the nearest repair shop was about an hour by car away. So one afternoon I drove over there to drop it off; by coincidence, it was Halloween. There was a charming young lady at the front desk, she took the laptop and brought it to the lab in the back. A little while later she came back: the good news is that they have the replacement part in stock, but it will take about 1-1/2 to 2 hours. I decided to wait for it to get done, to avoid yet another multi-hour drive. So at 5pm they look the doors, and I'm sitting in the back corner of the waiting room with a newspaper. Then another young lady came from the back, and started talking to the receptionist about Halloween costumes for the party that evening. Since they had forgotten that I was sitting in the corner, they tried on their costumes (!), which required taking their clothes off (!!). I tried to be as quiet as possible and not look, since I didn't want to get arrested. Fortunately, a little later the (male and fully dressed) repair tech came by and gave me the laptop back, and I left, before any embarrassing thing happened.
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Yeah, this one really merits a ROFLMAO reaction... 🤣
 
kent_dorfman766 said:
For me its ANY of the laptop keyboards. I'm an IBM model-M man...anything else falls short.
and why don't they make uber-sized laptops anymore. I have a 15 year old gateway with a hugemongous display and I haven't seen anything even half its size in years.
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I liked the bulk of a Lenovo T500 (bought it just for Libre/Coreboot), but wanted a W700ds with a slide-out second display and Wacom digitizer :p

Acer Predator 21 X is the largest modern-day laptop I've seen.

cracauer@ said:
In mine I can switch them in the BIOS.
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That felt more weird to me than trying to get used to the swapped keys :p

bgavin said:
The most problematic one I saw was the push-button coffee cup holder.
Not very sturdy at all... so many of them broke with just a regular cup of coffee.
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The optical drive? :p
 
My main one is locked-down BIOS. If you're going to offer an interface to configure the hardware I have, at least expose all the settings for it!

I had an Acer Predator Skylake + NVIDIA laptop that had Hyperthreading default-enabled, and no BIOS option to change it. I hooked a SOIC clip to a RPi, dumped the BIOS from the chip, paid someone else to unlock it on a website, flashed it back, got the HT setting and a ton of other cool stuff! But come on; this was a $1K gaming laptop, why was I prohibited from changing gaming-related settings? The odds of someone owning this laptop who didn't know what they were doing were probably minimal (price and gaming so power-user, but not sure about an edgy black-and-red-highlights chassis appealing to someone who might change a dangerous voltage setting randomly vs a power-user overclocker :p)

I'm also curious about Dell's lock on Legacy/CSM boot for internal drives. I have Coffeelake (Latitude 5591) and can't boot Linux from NVMe in Legacy, but can boot fine with a SD card and NVMe root. That's silly; I'm pretty sure there can't be a hard-technical reason why I can't CSM boot from NVMe, and oddly enough that Legacy SD boot seems to fix GNOME log-in sometimes freezing.
 
Anything non standard in desktop machines - connectors, power supply, drive bays, etc. I have a HP desktop machine with a power supply which is non standard, including connectors. It that burns I have either to to throw out the whole machine or buy a very expensive spare part from HP. And BTW, the case fan connector in this machine is also non standard.
 
Argentum said:
Anything non standard in desktop machines - connectors, power supply, drive bays, etc. I have a HP desktop machine with a power supply which is non standard, including connectors. It that burns I have either to to throw out the whole machine or buy a very expensive spare part from HP. And BTW, the case fan connector in this machine is also non standard.
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You may want to take a multimeter to that supply and write down what line holds what voltage, so you can retool a standard supply later on. Doing so after it had the magic smoke escape is a lot more trouble.
 
Crivens said:
You may want to take a multimeter to that supply and write down what line holds what voltage, so you can retool a standard supply later on. Doing so after it had the magic smoke escape is a lot more trouble.
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You can get an HP psu to ATX psu converter. You can also get a USB header that uses X2 USB 3 ports. I have an HP board I use with converters. I had to make some jumpers to get rid of fan and case lid errors though.
 
Crivens said:
You may want to take a multimeter to that supply and write down what line holds what voltage, so you can retool a standard supply later on. Doing so after it had the magic smoke escape is a lot more trouble.
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It is working at the moment and I think I can find a pin description from manuals. And besides the main power lines, there is a small cable coming out and goes directly to a small white connector on the MB. This small cable is not described in the manual and it reads P2 PWRCMD on the MB. The form factor of the power supply is also non standard. It is all good today, and I cross my fingers that it will stay that way until i do not want that box any more. However, looking forward, I do not see any good way to repair when needed.
 
Over the years for me it's the USB-IF, the way they've handled all the standards in the most confusing way possible, continually changing the names for stuff. USB PD-PPS is especially bad. I had to buy a hundred dollar e-marker reader to see which cables are what in the ever growing heap. It's like they're trying to blow our head gaskets on purpose.
 
CraigHB said:
Over the years for me it's the USB-IF, the way they've handled all the standards in the most confusing way possible, continually changing the names for stuff. USB PD-PPS is especially bad. I had to buy a hundred dollar e-marker reader to see which cables are what in the ever growing heap. It's like they're trying to blow our head gaskets on purpose.
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Intel is involved, so USB never had a chance of a sane naming scheme.
 
Those Lenovo laptops with foldback screens from about 10 years ago. It also works as a "tablet"... until the sensor which disables the keyboard in tablet mode decides to fail - then it only works as a tablet... a crappy gimmick, which you pay for and which means you've compromised on everything else (I have never owned one but have been asked to repair the things).
 
blackhole said:
Those Lenovo laptops with foldback screens from about 10 years ago. It also works as a "tablet"... until the sensor which disables the keyboard in tablet mode decides to fail - then it only works as a tablet... a crappy gimmick, which you pay for and which means you've compromised on everything else (I have never owned one but have been asked to repair the things).
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Wow, never herard of this. You win.
 
A crap laptop which can just about functions as a crap Windows tablet, which then stops functioning as a crap laptop. It was probably the only way to force users to use Windows 8 as intended...
 
I like 2-in-1s :p

I had a Dell Latitude with a stylus. Rotate and ambient light worked fine GNOME and Windows, Android-x86 worked on it enough to play Old School RuneScape like an Android tablet, and osu! (circle click music game) worked with the touchscreen nicely. I think I had a 15-17-inch model and it felt like a more-serious iPad (it looked like a workstation with a rear-hand strap vs an iPad that you'd casually watch YT vids on :p)

It seems like it'd be fragile to use for a main docked-desktop, laptop, and tablet modes, but I'd probably have a 2-in-1 just as a laptop or iPad replacement. If there was a rugged one with TB for an eGPU though that'd be cool.
 
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