Crappiest prebuilt computers

[hard candy]

Who makes the worst over-the-counter desktop computer systems?
Not counting Fred who lives 2 doors down, these are manufacturers who advertise and sell in retail shops or off their website.
I didn't include Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Velocity, etc, since people who pay $5000 for a desktop ARE NOT going to admit they are crappy!
Also, there are only 10 slots on the poll so some manufacturers are going to be left out. Feel free to add them in a post.

My opinion is that retail Compaq desktops are the worst. Followed by Sony who are overpriced and too proprietary. I got an Emachine on sale once and that turned out to be a very good computer so I like them.

[JayMan8081]

I think that Gateway is the worst pre-built retailer. They also have the worst after-sale support as well.

[xdakorx]

Emachines

[bsm2001]

had 2 hp's the first they trid to steal my floppy when i sent it in for repair. The second the put the resore sw on a partition on the hd co cd's.

[Digit0]

Hey where's Packard Bell?!?!

[cybertron]

From working at my campus help desk, I have found that the only truly hopeless situation is when you walk into someone's room and they are using an EMachine running Windows ME. There is no way to get these things on the network if they stop working :).

Compaq is a close second however. Check this (http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?threadid=85231) out. The only reason this didn't put them over the top for me is that it wasn't a personal experience (thank God):D

[hard candy]

Hey where's Packard Bell?!?!

They don't sell them on North America anymore, do they still sell them in Europe? They were a legend for "Packard Hell".

[Daedrus]

Originally posted by Digit0
Hey where's Packard Bell?!?!

In the Trash Can.

One thing Packard Hell had going for it was that power supplies, cd-roms, and HDDs were easy to remove and replace. Most done inside of 2 minutes. Not that I EVER had to replace these in customers' systems. Not at all, never. :p

[Digit0]

Originally posted by hard candy
They don't sell them on North America anymore, do they still sell them in Europe? They were a legend for "Packard Hell".

Believe it or not they still advertise in the UK :D

[WayStar]

I've personally had great luck with both ABS and Cyberpower.

Several family members have gone with Dell or HP, which is just fine by me, since I don't wanna be thier long-distance tech support if I can help it.

While I like building machines myself, it's so much cheaper to have an outfit like ABS or Cyberpower build it, since then I'm not paying shipping for the individual parts. :)

Gateways were nice back in the 386 days...

-Waylena

[WayStar]

As of this writing, it's a three-way tie between Gateway, eMachines, and HP/Compaq.

Since Gateway has acquired eMAchines, does this make them twice as crappy as HP?

-Waylena

[Drago]

My vote goes to compaq. A few years back my family bought a presario and half a year later this box was dead! After opening the case i noticed the heatsink + fan was not installed properly and this caused the processor and mobo to fry. Since then i kind of kept a grudge towards compaq:mad: . Now i just build my own boxes.:cool:

[EnigmaOne]

I've never bought pre-builts. Well, outside of one Kenbeck and an IMSAI that is, but that was more than a couple of decades ago. I do get handed pre-builts all the time though.

Packard Hell, Dell and Compaq used to rate up there as the worst, and Canon actually sold a crappy box for awhile (though their photoreprographics equipment simply can't be beat).

Nowdays, they all seem to be uniformly bad, and I still have yet to see one that would make me look twice.

[ernieg]

Any thoughts on Tigerdirect?
I'm actually considering my first prebuilt after a long time.
I can get the following for $818.00 US.
Here are the specs:
Platform: GA-K8VT800M Athlon 64 Mid-Tower Chassis w/ 300W PS
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3000 Processor
Memory: 1GB DDR400 PC3200 Non-ECC Memory (512MB x 2)
Hard Drive: 120GB Ultra ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive
Optical Drive: 16X DVD ROM Drive
Second Optical Drive: 52x32x52 CDRW Drive
Video Card: GeForce FX5200 128MB 8X AGP Card w/ TV-Out
Sound Card: Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! 5.1
Operating System: DOS
Warranty: Standard 1 year limited warranty
Branding Pack: Tiger-Systemax ATX Branding Pack
Office PCs: TIGER ATHLON 64 BTO PC W/ DOS

I just don't have the time to mess with building my own anymore, and this looks like a pretty good deal, and I figure this will last for a while, and allow me to still add on a bit.

Feedback anyone?

[hammer123]

My sister's HP won't let me boot from a CD or configure the bios

[psi42]

I notice you've got HP and Compaq in the same category.

I know they have merged, but the tech support lines are still kept separate. If you need to call tech support (suppose you HD dies and you're under warranty), you will have a very different experience depending on who you need to call. IMHO Compaq's phone support is incredibly bad, and most (I'm not saying all) of the people I had to talk to were rather rude and didn't listen to what I was saying.

That's kind of off on a tangent, though, I guess... the question was, after all, about the quality of the systems themselves. But I couldn't resist the above interjection....


I voted for emachines. I have a rather old (Cyrix 250mhz powered) emachine, which sounds like a lawnmower. It's those junky proprietary power supplies. I replaced it with another proprietary emachines power supply, and it still sounds like a lawnmower. On the more modern end, I have heard that emachines, although quieter, haven't gotten much better.


Back to compaq. I haven't had much experience with newer compaq boxes, but the older one I do have says it all: proprietary case, proprietary psu, BUT it does all work, and after removing the compaq-modified win98 (which is just like win98 but even slower), and installing a Penguin Powered OS, it is quite nippy.


:)
~psi42

[JamminJoeyB]

I can't knock gateway to badly. I had a p133 built by them as my first modern pc. The thing was an absolute work horse. Did everything I ever asked it to and was probably the most reliable system I had ever had with windows.

I will concur that compaq and hp leave a lot to be desired. I had the nightmare of being the computer manager for 1 year in Korea. 85 identical compaqs with 300 mhz processors that were just total POS. Even putting every machine up to 256megs and loading NT4 on those systems didn't help much. They were running win98.

Maybe someday the DOD will embrace GNU/linux. Till then I will just have to wait. At least we have one unix box in the building I get to ssh into when I need to.

[leonpmu]

Unfortunately, you can only put one vote it :(

Anyway, I voted HP/Compaq, a number of reasons, a friend had a new Compaq laptop, came with XP, he wanted 98, so he e-mailed them for the hardware info, got a snotty e-mail back basically saying fsck you, it is made for XP so you will deal with it. Hacked us bot off big time, so I installed Mandrake for him, found out what the hardware was, and installed win98 dual boot. HP becuase my brother-in-law, has a Brio, what a joke, you can't even adjust the amount of RAM allocated to the onboard display, and there is no AGP slot for upgradeability!!!

Gateway, simply because they are not a gateway to anything but support hell!!! Constant freezing, hardware failures etc.

These of course, have been my experiences, anyone is free to have their own opinoin.

Oh yes, also the HP/Compaq support on their PC's is a joke. The HP support for their printers however, is EXCELLENT!!!