Worst computer hardware feature you have seen?

At the moment, it is BIOS checks in my dell optiplex that complains about my new fans (they run at a lower rpm than the stock ones) and stops from booting with noisy beeps; there seems to be no way to circumvent it. Luckily it happens only if I reboot; a cold start works alright.
 
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.
 
kent_dorfman766 said:
I'm an IBM model-M man
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Me, and others, too. And me too always carry a real keyboard with my laptop besides a trackball. I also cannot stand those laptop keyboards for doing something real on the machine.

Since the Ms are not produced anymore, and it's hard to get an errorless used one for a reasonable price (e.g. ebay), you may already knew unicomp, the only producer of buckling spring keyboards.
Since you're in the USA you may pay reasonable shipping charges. Being in Europe buying something from the USA is pure luxury, because of astronomical shipping charges. Recently I checked for a FreeBSD T-Shirt (stickers were also a nice idea) which I could also sponsor the foundation with; but I will not pay 50$ shipping charge extra for a 30$ t-shirt. I simply don't get why everything always needs to be shipped by air cargo express. I can wait a couple of weeks for such things (and I also don't need to know the time stamp of when the container was loaded into another plane.) Let it be shipped by ship, if it cost less.
Recently I saved my unicomp in the shelves, and currently I'm testing a Varmilo (while on the pictures they look mawkish in reality I find them look actually really cool.) They are not buckling spring, of course, but with Cherry switches - not exactly the feeling, but also good, and above all a lot less noisy 😁
 
Maturin said:
Since you're in the USA you may pay reasonable shipping charges. Being in Europe buying something from the USA is pure luxury, because of astronomical shipping charges. Recently I checked for a FreeBSD T-Shirt (stickers were also a nice idea) which I could also sponsor the foundation with; but I will not pay 50$ shipping charge extra for a 30$ t-shirt. I simply don't get why everything always needs to be shipped by air cargo express. I can wait a couple of
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Yes. One may wonder why shipping charges from China to Europe are much lower (in many cases zero) than from US. And this is no wonder that people buying Chinese goods from internet. Personally, in very rare cases I have bought something from US because of these charges you mentioned.
 
Argentum said:
One may wonder why shipping charges from China to Europe are much lower (in many cases zero) than from US.
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That's off-topic, but I know from Europe that more customs duty but shipping fees for China imports are reduced as subvention for China's economy (Don't get started on politics! I'm no politician, I simply just once had some insights into intercontinental shipping, including customs; maybe you know some one working in logistics (mostly girls 😁), buy her(him) a coffee, and listen - one may learn some interesting things about how our world works.)
While at the same time I presume in the USA packages are not dispatched at a normal post office, but the package delivery service comes, and collects it on the spot, which of course cost more; plus they don't get any subventions; especially not at the moment, which we didn't start *cough* - which means they sell less... 😁
 
cracauer@ said:
They all came back to me after fake DHL delivery attempts.
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Yeah. Also heard such storys, especially from large citys like Berlin. Even if DHL is (partner of?) german post it's a private package delivery service. Those are the benefits of cost reducing by privatization within advanced capitalism: You pay extra to get no service at all.
You may consider, and check prices/possibilities, not to ship directly to the receptionist's address, but to a post office (shop) within the area, to be stored (for max. 4 weeks ?), and to be picked up by your receptionist there.
Could be worth a shot.
 
Oh, I remembered one annoying thing: I honestly hate it when they make weak and breakable plastic "latches" on laptops (where the top part ("keyboard") of the laptop case meets the bottom ("mainboard") and on the VGA-matrix itself. They could have put them on screws. What are we paying you for?
 
cracauer@ said:
I shipped tech items to friends in Germany, They all came back to me after fake DHL delivery attempts.
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You can actually sue them for this. It happened before, and it geht's ears picking up. It's got to be you to sue (or threaten to do it) because you have a contract with them, which they broke.
 
Having worked in systems building, I do understand a lot of the misfeatures in servers, which usually come from an honest attempt at spreading limited resources as fairly as possible. But misfeatures in laptops usually stem from companies not trying to understand the needs of their users. And yes, the Apple touchpad function key row is near the top of the list. As is Lenovo's (and at the time most other vendors) tiny little trackpads, when Apple already had reasonable ones. And Apple's bizarre lack of ports. I think what I learn from that is that the underlying problem is really attitude, not technical capability.

Maturin said:
Since the Ms are not produced anymore, ...
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Unicomp model M keyboards are still available, right? I haven't ordered one in about 5 years or so.
 
I don't know if it is the worst, but on some Lenovo laptops (I'm looking at you IdeaPad ...) you have to put a straightened paper clip into a tiny hole to push the button that takes the machine into BIOS when you power it on.
 
1. Keyboards with single-row-height Enter key. Or F1-12 keys not separated from numeric keys, or not grouped into 4-key groups. It's virtually impossible to use such keyboard without looking at it.

2. Vendor specific IDE ribbon cables in notebooks. It broke in my Tecra, and a perfectly healthy notebook went to trash.

3. Vendor-specific (toolless) HDD mounts in PC cases. They should make it easier to mount/unmount drives, but they do the opposite. The plastic HDD rails in Chieftec case break very easily. To mount drives without them, you need steel strips, a drill, a hacksaw, and hours of work. I found similar problem in other cases, e.g. HP.

4. SFF computers. The TFX power supply in my Optiplex failed. A new one costs 3 times price of the computer. You can't move motherboard into regular ATX case - everything is completely different. I ended up mounting an ATX PSU outside the SFF case.

5. Ambient temperature sensor in Optiplex. When it fails, the fan runs at full 12 V and is louder than a jet plane taking off, despite CPU and everything being as cold as 20 deg. C. I connected fan to 5 V, but even then it was loud as hell. It was only after adding a resistor that I was able to keep the fan back under control.

6. And here is the "winner". Every brand of power supply, that has detachable cables, uses same sockets, but different pinout. I had to add cables to my PSU, because I bought 3 new hard drives. But I only had cables from a broken PSU from another manufacturer ...
 
I have nothing against BTX I just feel it was an attempt to disrupt the market for little gain to no gain.
Its something monopolist like Intel do.
Create reference standards for the big boys to follow.
Bull in the China shop.
 
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the keyboard that shipped with those touchbars.
(T)he butterfly keyboard’s many faults. The biggest is simply that the design was unreliable. The mechanism was so fragile that seemingly any little piece of debris or grit could break a key, keeping it from working or making it type double letters. Adding insult to injury, Apple’s laptop construction meant that replacing that single key wasn’t a simple operation. It required taking the laptop into an Apple repair center where the entire machine would have to be disassembled.
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www.theverge.com

The saga of Apple’s bad butterfly MacBook keyboards is finally over

Good riddance.
www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
 
LibreQuest said:
I respectfully disagree solely based on the airflow design. ATX ram modules block airflow for other onboard components. AT and BTX don't have that issue.
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Exactly - BTX had a lot of guidelines regarding cooling and avialable space around e.g. sockets, optimizing airflow, components and connector placement etc...
It would have streamlined a lot of the uncontrolled growth and solved many of the resulting incompatibilities that nag ATX until today...

Back then I was also very sceptical about BTX, but after diving a bit into the topic and reviewing an actual case + system (I worked for an online hardware magazine back then) I was quite fond of many details of the standard. True, not everything was golden, but there were many steps in the right direction, whereas ATX has just continued to become an absolute dumpster fire of vendor-specific solutions...
 
Any laptop touchpad instead of a proper 2-button mouse with a wheel:
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