PC World's 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

[ToyotaNSaturn]

Link to full article at PC World's Web Site

I owned #13. I can't complain, I credit my dad's purchase of #13 as my springboard in to the computer world. It's where I learned about DOS. My sister performed a real-time flight from Mieg's field to New York on that thing with Microsoft's Flight-Sim 1.0. She waited ALL day, and nearly ALL night. LOL I give her tons of credit though, she was only 9 when she commenced her first virtual flight.

The quote for #15..."Click-click-click. That was the sound of data dying on thousands of...(#15's)". Thats so funny to look back on that device as a "great" way to save data. I'm glad this one died a fairly quick death at the hands of CD-R's.

As for #3, I was able to manually arrange autoexec.bat and config.sys files to make the most RAM availble to a PC. Only QEMM beat me by 9K, ONCE. MemMaker was a joke.

Does anyone use DriveSpace anymore, on ANYTHING?

I disagree with #4. #4 wasn't terribly awful like #15. It was just a product that completely missed the mark, but not one that was terribly awful like #1 or #2. I liked the technology that #2 brought to the binary table, but their execution was terrible. All about advertising, not about quality. Sad, real sad.

 

[brianl703]

I remember that Pointcast stuff. I never installed it, but I got to reinstall the OS on several PCs with Pointcast and other junk loaded on them that had slowed to a crawl.

 

[Greggy_D]

Remember going into the BIOS on a PS2 to manually map the memory blocks? #@$%! that was fun back then (and I'm not being sarcastic).

Some of those "products" on the list gave me a trip down memory lane. I remember deploying Pointcast throughout our office in 1997 and it completely choked our 256k ISDN link to the Net.

Windows ME was a true abortion. I had two games MADE BY MICROSOFT (Links and Crimson Skies) that refused to run on ME. That was the shortest time an OS has ever been on my drive.....a grand total of 20 minutes.

The IBM "Deathstars" bit me hard on my home PC. I was all about the new glass platter tech and they were getting stunning reviews. Fast forward 9 months later......BOOM.

 

[JustinH]

Cuecat came to my head when i seen the title.

 

[Pablo]

I think the way they laid out the top 25 sucks.

Mostly software. Interesting.

I disagree on ME. I had a Dell for 5 years that came loaded with ME. Rarely/never crashed, did everything I asked it to. But it was a home business PC, didn't play games on it.

BOB - now was there anyone who expected that to be a winner?

They completely ignored HP drivers. SOME of their drivers are the scourge of the earth.(Hardware OK, drivers suck)

 

[TooManyWheels]

From reading just the title I was pretty sure the Zip drive was in there somewhere. I think it deserves a higher ranking than 15 though. Between the cost of the drive and the media, which provided ZERO benefit ever due to the faulty operation, I lost a pretty penny on that system.

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

Iomega was brazen and wanted the Zip drive to replace the floppy. From a storage stand point, it made sense..100MB or 1.44MB? Then, BOOM! The bad news got out and CD-R's started to fall in price. Bye Bye Iomega.

Then Iomega purchased some NAS vendor that offered a 1U NAS solution...I flat out refused to do business with Iomega and simply went elsehwere for that 1U NAS solution. I'm surprised they're still in business anymore.

Remember all that mucky Iomega software that wound up on any Win9x/NT4 system with a Zip drive? Ick. That stuff was useless as SoftRAM.

 

[simple_gifts]

Well, i'm not sure why the Coleco ADAM isn't listed; even with the stunning success of the annoying cabbage patch dolls, the ill conceived ADAM, ran the decades old "Connecticut Leather Company" (co le co) right into the ground.

This was to be regarded as the Adam Bomb.

 

[sprintman]

They obviously never saw a VAXmate!

 

[Vilan]

I've been using WinME at home for years, I don't see what the fuss is about. No particular trouble when I installed it to upgrade from 95. Haven't had it interfere with any programs. I use XP at work and I don't feel it's any better than ME. Guess I'm just lucky. The only real complaint I have is that the DOS emulation isn't as stable as it was for Win95.

 

[Pablo]

The hatred of ME came from gamers I think. To rate it as one of the worst is weird IMHO. Win 3.0? DOS X.0? There seem to be other loser software out there........most of it I can't even remember the names of.

I've had some sh~~ CRT monitors in the past. Not on this list!

 

[UncleS2]

I'll confess to having a CueCat, years ago on the previous computer, for a couple of months.

A real gee-whiz completely useless appendage, and yes it did seem to finally cause trouble. But Hey, it saved us from the terrible chore of typing triple-w dot company-name dot com!

 

[Virtuoso]

Nothing wrong with DOS

6.0 didn't bring much to the table; but 5.0 was the bomb.

 

[Crashbox]

I had PointCast on my old Pentium 133/NT 4.0 machine for a couple of months- it was indeed a hog.

I never had Windows Me but I knew someone who did- very unstable; I'd rather run my Atari 800 with the Byrd 288K RAM upgrade and a pair of Happy 1050 drives!!!