Build Advice Your Manufacturer Blacklist

I've only ever had on e or two freezes from my iPod, normally after playing the iPod quiz a few times and going back to music without turning it on and off again, but it's rare enough that it doesn't bother me. I got pretty lucky with mine. I don't understand all the hate from a personal level, because my 3rd gen, and the 4th gen my girl has are both perfect.

I avoid Sony mp3 players like the plague. I had two before my iPod, and my sister had one for a while, and they did nothing but break and look unstylish.

 

Cowon

 

Blacklist:
HP laptops, Mostly their power supplies
Sony stereo equipment
Belkin routers <= utter rubbish
Our 2wire modem. Since we got it one by one the Ethernet ports have stopped working

White list:
Creative labs speakers
My* ipod nano 1st Gen (I treat it like a god) Only to have the battery life slowly diminish but that's expected with old hardware.
All Cisco equipment

 

blacklist:
apple: so behind the curve its not even funny.
evga: worst uk customer support ever.

whitelist
logitech: g25, z5500's mx revolution need i go on?
nvidia: 8800gtx is the greatest video card since the 3DFX orchid rightious

 

Acer computers.

Not that the pc' itself is bad, but their support is the worst I have ever experienced, even if your pc is a year old, don't expect them to have uploaded any drivers. and you better be prepared to find drivers obscure places as their own support won't be able to find them.

 

Seagate
Hitachi
Sony

As for laptops, which I cannot build:

Dell

The ultimate blackslisted company, I will never buy one of their products no matter how good or superior: APPLE

Companies I buy almost exclusively from:
Western Digital
Antec (Nothing can beat P183 and Black Mini P180 imo, except maybe Corsair Obsidian)
Gigabyte
nVidia (and now EVGA since BFG Tech left)
Corsair

 

I still proudly wear my free BFG Tech t-shirts, such a shame they're gone.

As for blacklisting, I concur that Dell should be forced to sell only monitors. Also, Speed Link, due to my medusa headset. It was recommended by CPC I think, but have returned it once and now its broken again (me and a friend have both encountered the same 2 faults) and its always had a high pitched background whine.

Recommendations have to go to every company who made anything in my now 3yo build which has been carted around the country umpteen times, subjected to vista, f@h, excessive multi-day gaming sessions and amateur overclocking and is still going strong. Ultimate kudos to CPC though, since all the components were in their recommended hardware section bar the graphics card if I recall correctly.

 

I've got one of those! I totally forgot about it!

 

+1

I also nominate Apple (despite owning several of their products) for their unpleasant addiction to DRM and the general unfriendliness of OS X to even basic customization. I shouldn't have to use sudo terminal commands to alter how often Time Machine backs up, Steve. Seriously, that's full-blown retarded, much like you assume most of your customers to be.

 

Wont touch Maxtor and Seagate HDDs ever again, had 2 seagates just randomly die, and a maxtor that died *very* dangerously, as in it could have caused quite a large fire if I wasn't sat watching tv in the front room at my old house.

I will only buy midrange/high end Linksys/Cisco/Draytek networking gear, won't even consider another make even if it looks like a bargain.

No idea if ePox are still around but the motherboards I had off them back on Socket A were plagued with badly thought out design and a high failure rate, built several PCs with them and every single one came back to be swiftly replaced by an Abit something or other.

Also won't use a cheap Jetway/ECS/PC Chips (add cheap taiwanese make here) motherboards, just asking for trouble.

Recently fell in love with the bigger Samsung drives, cheap fast and reliable

 

Blacklist:




My previous board (IC7-G MAX II) was the most NOISY never made by mankind, around 55dba after couple month. I saw a lot of Blue Screen with it without OC


Baddly I can't say 'Don't buy Abit product ! They're the DEVIL !!' because the company is defunt since 2008 XD

 

Blacklist:
Asus. I've had the misfortune to come into contact with three (four?) of their motherboards, and each one's had a quirky layout (jumpers in odd places, mainly). Also, my girlfirends Asus motherboard refused to keep the correct time/date in the BIOS, regardless of BIOS batteries.
VIA chipsets. I bought an Abit KG7 to avoid their cacky 4-in-1 drivers. My SATA controller card also is VIA-based; and if I'd have known this beforehand...

Whitelist:
I have a favourites list, but I don't want to tempt fate...

Unconvinced list:
Western Digital HDDs. The first one I get since my 486 days, a Caviar Blue 640GB, has developed bad sectors within months of purchasing.
Logitech. Ok, so the batteries in my old MX700 wouldn't hold a charge for over a day, but finding replacement batteries was impossible... regardless of current, charge, etc. The MX700 simply refused to work with any other batteries. The Logitech keyboard I'm using has keys that don't depress correctly if they're not hit centrally. The Logitech webcam my dad passed on to me... WinXP views it as the default network connection!?

 

Yeah I think this sort of thing is behind my prejudice towards apple (I freely admit it is a prejudice and doesn't really make much sense). They force you to do things their way which really gets my back up. If you have an ipod//iphone you HAVE to use itunes. Want to get some music from a friend's computer? Tough you can't. My mp3 player can plug into any pc and upload or download any type of file. Oh and it has a generic connecter so I could swap it with the cable that came with my camera, or the cable that came with my graphic tablet, or the cable that came with my old mp3 player.....

 

Another one to throw up here.

Compaq.

MY COMPUTER CAUGHT FIRE!!! (vreg went and lit a capacitor on fire and... yeah....)

This was about 5 years ago so i don't have pics.

 

Agree. I had a DFI Socket 478, Intel 845 chipset board that was a hunk of garbage.

It was a couple months before they started coming out with the LANParty series.

Everyone was drooling over the newest LANParty boards, and I was troubleshooting a crappy non-LANParty non-enthusiast board.

The IDE controller just failed. It stopped recognizing the hard drives. I lost one channel, uninstalled the CD drives and put both hard drives on the good channel. Worked for a month or two, and then lost that channel.

It had a whole host of other annoyances, but the dead IDE controller did it for me.

I picked up a Gigabyte 848 chipset board (this was when 865 and 875 chipsets were just coming out with awesome new stuff, so some manufacturers released a 'stopgap' 848 chipset which was 845 with some extra features like SATA added on) and have had it for almost seven years, and it still works fine.

Otherwise, I guess Apple. iPod issues. I have a 5.0 generation 60gb iPod that just randomly died the other day. It would turn on, show the apple logo, make a couple clicking noises, and turn off.
Yes, I know it has been almost 4 years, but I used it so rarely (I bust it out maybe 3 times a year) and treat it so gently (in a heavy duty leather case that it is never removed from, usually it is kept in a desk drawer) that it really annoyed me. I probably had a grand total of about 25 hours of use on it, and it failed six months after the end of my 3-year extended warranty.

WD is definitely on my whitelist, with two exceptions - two of the same model (WD Element 500GB external) drives both had their power bricks fail within three months of each other. However, that is an assembly from a third party supplier, not a WD part, so I still trust them. Wired the drives up to a spare PSU and they have been running strong. I have a whole bunch of WD drives dating back to 2002, and all of them still work fine.

For questionables, Samsung hard drives. I bought a Spinpoint 250GB when Samsung first started making drives. it still works, 5 years later. My mom got a PC with a Spinpoint 250GB in it, and it failed. I just bought a Spinpoint F3 1TB because of how highly recommended it is, and because the drive on my PC now is a Seagate and I don't trust it.

 

Will not buy desktops from (ordered from least favorite to somewhat indifferent/other second choice)

Apple, Alienware, emachines, Lenovo, Compaq, Gateway, Dell:


parts
Creative
Foxconn
Patriot Memory
Hitachi HDD due to cheap plastic they use for connectors

 

Huh? I can change the frequency of time machine updates using the time machine program, i think?

 

You think wrong, even though something as basic as that really ought to be in the GUI and not in some plist file I have to dig up. Enjoy - old, but unfortunately still true, at least as far as I can tell from my Snow Leopard MacBook, which is right in front of me.

It's a shame because Time Machine is otherwise a brilliant program that's pleasant to use, simple to set up and even makes hunting in backups for old files easy. That's a story that's true of a fair bit of Apple's products - good, but ruined by the underlying principle of their way or the highway.

 

Biostar (motherboards)
Seagate (hard drives)
Samsung (hard drives)
Abit (motherboards)

And until very recently, Gigabyte. I had something like 5 or 6 Gigabyte Socket A motherboards go faulty out of warranty back when Socket A Athlon XP 3200's were the fastest CPU money could buy.

I have a list of tool manufacturers the length of my arm that I always avoid, but I won't go into that now - it'd be easier to list the tool mnufactureres I do trust

Networking gear - I always go for the better Excel connection stuff like modules, cables and cabs and as far as switches and routers go I never buy the cheapy stuff either (someone mentioned this already above).

 

The life span of a computer is of 5 to 7 years, depending of usage. Anything at 5 years or older should expect to break every soon.