Hardware purchases that you regret the most

Sometimes buying hardware is a shot in the dark. They may not let you test it in the shop, you might have to order it online etc. Sometimes you win, sometimes you loose. Let's talk about those times when you lost.


Here are my failed choices:





I used to have the SHP2500 headphones before I bought these. They were really good for their price. One day, the cable broke so I had to get new ones and I've decided that since I had some money put away I should buy more expensive, better ones.

I live in a small town. There really isn't too much of a choice when it comes to... anything, actually. And what is available in stores here is almost always priced higher than the same stuff online. So I decided to rely on reviews and buy the headphones online. The SHP2700 was an evolution of the model I had so I assumed they will be just like that only better.

So they cost me over twice as much as I paid for the 2500 and when I unboxed them and put them on I was bitterly disappointed. They are more comfy than the previous model, yes, but the audio quality is absolute dudu. The middle frequencies sound like they are "squeezed". It's hard to explain but the point is the sound is distorted rendering the headphones useless for anything other than casual music listening when on the train. What a waste of money.







I can't even remember the model name since I no longer have it. I bought this thing some years ago because I really wanted a DVD player and I was on a tight budget. I was a kid and all I had was my birthday money. The Korr was the cheapest player available.

It was a disaster all around. Image quality was poor compared to some other DVD players, often the thing would stutter even if there was a tiny scratch on the disc (I mostly watched rented DVDs so naturally they were pretty badly scratched), and some discs wouldn't work at all with this thing for some reason.

There were very few options you could adjust, which is annoying for someone like me who likes to have control over many aspects of my movie-watching experience. And though the player was Divx compatible, you wouldn't want to play movies from CDs because the drive made pretty a loud buzzing noise. It wouldn't happen with DVDs, though.

I ended up mostly playing movies from my pendrive as that was the only way to avoid the noise and stutter issues.

And it broke very quickly too although I didn't use it much. One day the thing just refused to play anything from any media. I threw it away with sore heart for wasting my birthday money on that thing.

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Check out my blog: Yasashii's Retro Game Playground

Atari Jaguar

Sega Dreamcast

If you've still got that Dreamcast I'll take it off your hands. Good condition DCs are getting hard to find - Great console hampered by not being a Playstation.

The only thing I regret buying recently was a Samsung 40" TV a few years ago that I kept for a total of 20 hours. The guy in the store said it had 4:4 pulldown ('proper' 24p for playing Blu Rays, basically) and I believed him without doing my own research. £500+ changed hands and I took it home.

Blu Rays were jerkier than a 70s Steve Martin movie and a quick Google confirmed that the TV didn't have 4:4 pulldown at all. Lesson learned - A lot of HDTVs which say that they're 24p actually don't do it properly.

Luckily I was able to get a full refund because of being mis-sold the set, but the guy still tried to wheedle out of it. When a complete layman knows more than the salesman selling you expensive bits of kit you can only be in one electrical store.

Currys.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

I beg to differ. A few months ago I went to a small electrical shop in my town. I asked the guy if they have SATA cables. In return, he asked me what a SATA cable was. I stood there for like 5 seconds speechless, as I was taken aback at the guy's ignorance (considering that he's a salesman at a freaking electrical store).

*Merrily dusts off the topic while humming*

I bought my first Android phone on a rather tight budget almost exactly two years ago. Time came to pick the brand. I had owned a Sony Ericsson W200i a few years before, and I was very happy with it. I had also owned a Samsung and it made me cry barbwire. Conclusion was simple: you cannot go wrong with Sony. So, I went ahead and bought the Sony Xperia E:



I thought I went about this the right way: I'd watched all the reviews on YouTube I could find and I even played around a bit with one I got for 5 minutes from an acquaintance. All seemed fine; a normal entry-level Android phoned, it had seemed.

The reviewers gave it quite an acclaim. "Great value for money" they said, "It's very comfortable to use and it's snappy and reliable", they claimed.

And because you'd be hard-pressed to find a review that actually tells you the horrible truth you will learn only a bit after you've already bought the E, let it be known far and wide: if an elephant took a dump, then a horse pissed on it, a monkey puked on it and if this mess was left to rot for 2 weeks... it would still not be a proper representation of how unbelievably, painfully bad the Xperia E is.

Here's why: right after you turn it on, what you want to do, of course, is update the system and all the apps. Well, you can't. Turns out that the phone's internal memory is, for unfathomable reasons, divided into two partitions: a very small one where the OS and all of your apps sit, and a pretty large one... for your photos. While some apps can be moved to the second, bigger partition, many cannot and those include all the system apps. You know, the ones that you really need to work well. Even if you don't install a single app, and you don't put a single file after you've bought the phone, you simply cannot update all the apps because space runs out in minutes. This alone makes this phone worthless, but that's just the tip of the ice berg.

And yes, there are ways to move some apps to the other partition and even to an sd card (which you cannot do by default) but those will still not move the system apps, and most of the methods require you to root the phone, which will inevitably void your warranty. The only way you can fix the problem is if you repartition the phone manually, which is a madly complicated process and can easily brick your phone so don't even think about it unless you're an Android magician.

Anyway, now that you have a semi-up-to-date phone, it's time to install some apps. Mainly, I installed some games for procrastination purposes, a GPS app, the Dolphin browser, and a few other music-related stuffs. The reviews said that the touchscreen is very nice. Well, it's downright the single worst freakin' touchscreen I had ever used. It's laggy, its touch detection is weird, unnatural and messy, it's not as sensitive as you'd like when you're typing or playing, but it's crazy sensitive when you slightly, minutely touch it with a millimeter of skin by mistake. Lovely. And don't even get me started on the typing. You can simply forget about your skills as a fast typer. Typing more than one character every half-a -second or less will cause the keyboard to spew gibberish you didn't intend, simply because of how laggy and crappy the touchscreen and the performance of the phone are. Writing texts on the E is a painful experience every time. Installing different keyboards improves on this a bit, but not by much.

As for the performance: let me just say, it's bad. Most 3D games and apps will cause you to feel your beard growing as you're waiting for your input to take effect. Also, you can forget of having more than one app running at a time because if you turn on more, the lag becomes real. There's really not much more to say on the topic, you'd have to experience it. And if you are, and you're angry at me for not having written this earlier: I can only say I'm sorry.

As for the physical part, it's also less than satisfactory. The entire back of the phone is bowed for better grip. Well, yes, it works, I guess, but most people like to put a rubber case to protect their phone. You can't really do that because it won't bend along the back and as a result, it will be ugly and the phone will become too fat. And God knows you should get a case for this phone as the screen bulges out in such a way that if you drop the phone, it will almost certainly break (which I honestly believe to be intentional). As for the general quality: let me just say that the metal ring around the camera lens has already fallen off and that nice, little, seemingly metal frame around the phone is actually plastic and it the fake metal surface will most likely scrape off at some point. Also, the entire case makes a screechy noise when you grip it strongly. I'd expect some chinese-made toys and the dollar store to be better made than this.

Overall, it staggers me that a company with so many resources and so much reputation for good-quality electronic equipment could design and make such an utter piece of dudu. It's as badly designed on every single level as it can be and it makes the user count days until they have enough money to throw this stinky pile out the window and make the right choice this time: buy a Samsung; they have really improved over the last few years.

I regret buying a macbook pro. Everyone kept telling me it was so good for editing video. I can't even run the color correction software on this thing because it's got a ****** non-upgradable GPU. Also it crashes everyday and if I update the OS my linear editor will be incompatible and I'd have to buy all new software.

This stupid thing doesn't even have an audio input for ADR/Foley. The headphone jack is output only so that apple could save an extra $15