The Worst PC in America

[harrymccracken]

[UPDATE: We have a winner! Thanks to all who entered...]

I'm not eligible to enter Technologizer's contest to find the worst PC in America, and therefore don't have a shot at the HP Envy 13 laptop that the winner will receive. But I'm kicking things off by telling you about the worst PC I still own. Like many bad PCs, it started out as a great PC: When I bought it (in 1994, I think, for about $1000--even though it was refurbished) I was extremely proud of it at the time. After all, it was the first notebook I'd ever owned.

It's my Zenith Data System Z-Lite 425, a subnotebook which, even today, has an appealingly slim profile (albeit with a screen that's bizarrely small by current standards--at least it leaves room for ginormous contrast and brightness controls).

The Z-Lite has a fairly small power brick with a snap-on floppy drive that optionally sits in between the brick and the laptop. The drive no longer works, but I need to use it because I've lost the cable that lets the brick connect directly, and the battery is so weak that the system dies within twenty seconds or so if I unplug it. The connector on the floppy drive is broken, but still works if I wiggle it into place just so.

The Z-Lite has a VGA port (which probably still works) and serial and parallel ports (which I don't think are compatible with any devices still in my possession--oh wait a minute, I could connect my Psion PDA).

At some point--this decade, I'm guessing, I tried inserting a Compact Flash card in a PC Card adapter into one of the Z-Lite's twin PCMCIA slots. It didn't work. Which leaves me at a loss as to how to get information in and out, since the system doesn't have a modem or Ethernet, and I don't think I could easily figure out how to use the parallel or serial ports to do the job.

The worst bit of physical damage to the system--which I only discovered when I took these photos--is that one of the hinges is broken completely in two. The screen is connected to the other half of the machine only by one hinge; I'm amazed that the computer still boots at all.

The Z-Lite is running DOS and Windows 3.11; Windows doesn't look so hot on its monochrome screen, and the snap-on trackball that the machine came with broke long ago, so I have no pointing device.

Here's a list of some of the software I depended on in the mid-1990s.

And here's an e-mail (which I received via cc:Mail for DOS in 1995) from Steve Bass advising his PCW colleagues to take Melatonin to prep for the arduous journey to Spring COMDEX.

And when I opened Word 6.0 for the first time in around 13 years, it automatically loaded an unfinished manuscript for a review of e-mail clients which I was working on the last time I ran the program.

Okay, just pulling this computer out of my closet and booting it has made me nostalgic for an earlier era in my life, not to mention an earlier era in tech. But let's face it--in its current condition, this is a really bad PC.

Ready to enter our contest by telling us about your truly terrible PC? Read the rules and regulations, then tell us about it in a reply to this post. And even if you don't enter, feel free to chime in with your thoughts about my lousy PC or any others that people share with us here.

[Brandon Backlin]

While it's not old (like Harry's), I had an HP DV8315NR that was pretty average, then started dipping into "Gee, I wish I could slam this with a sledgehammer" territory.

This is how it looked. It had an AMD Turion 64-bit proc. clocked at 1.8GHz, 802.11g wireless, a 17" widescreen at a resolution of 1440x900, and ATi Radeon Xpress 200M for graphics. Pretty decent specs, right? If I recall correctly, I paid ~$1400 for this machine.

It went pretty average for about a year, then it started to bog down. I kept the factory install for as long as I could, and made the mistake of paying the Geek Squad to remove all of the malware. I couldn't use the restore disk, since it would put all this garbage back on there. So, I installed my Windows XP SP1 upgrade disk to the machine, it ran faster than under the Media Center edition that it came with. That kept the software humming along just fine, but the hardware was just beginning to receive some damage (just as the warranty runs out, surprisingly). A little bit of "play" has developed in the display hinges; but that's it.

Six months later, the play got greater and the machine started to bog down yet again! I didn't install anything but drivers, office software, and some games (not 3D, 3D gaming was not an enjoyable experience on this machine). I felt the plastic under where the processor sits; and ouch! Almost burnt my fingertips. A quick run of Speedfan shows the processor running ~80 degrees C! Yeah, that's freaking hot! In fact. owners of the laptop suggest that I used it on a table. What?!

Another year passes and the thing is so dog slow that videos from Youtube (before the HD days) were stuttering. My thinking was some form of heat damage occurring in the proc. I didn't want to mess with that; because at that point, it was more economically viable to just let the computer die with the little dignity it had left. I lent it to a friend who really liked Second Life (if you combine the end of that last sentence with this sentence, I don't mean to offend Second Life players out there). His playing experience? About the same as watching a Youtube video, but since Second Life has graphics hardware acceleration; that's pretty bad, think about 5 frames a second. At this point, there was a lot of play in the display hinges (and some crackling noises) and the processor was getting really hot. I started putting fans that directed air from an AC vent to my laptop, hardly helped the issue. I decided to look into the hinge issue. Turns out, the joint of the left hinge just snapped right in half (video here, with okay lighting and shot composition), and the right one also broke. I replaced the hinges, and the display was fixed.

Just after I fixed the hinges however, I was tweaking the software one day to make this thing go faster. All the sudden, in the middle of tweaking, it randomly powers down (as in poof! it's off). I turned it back on and ran through all the safeguards that Windows put into place in case this happened. About 15 minutes later, again! I was pretty fed up at this point (the very first time I got fed up with equipment) and just left it alone for a few days. I then tried running it without the battery, same issue. Several combos of battery/without battery and even "calibrating" the battery (a five-hour process) revealed the same results. Turns out, after opening it up again, one of the contacts for the DC electrical input was lose, almost nonexistent. The contacts for the battery were routed to these other contacts, so no matter what I did, the problem would continue to exist. I called my Second Life loving friend and said, "You're not getting this laptop back. It won't run for more than 30 minutes." Good thing he didn't pay for it! And it was not carelessness that contributed to this, as both med and my friend take good care of our electronics and the hinge replacement did not require any motherboard maneuvering.

Believe it or not, I did get a return on my investment. HP happened to run a replacement-recycle program where users could send in their old electronics and get a rebate after purchasing a new HP product. I joined their student program and got the rebate ($175.00) plus the student discount on a 25.5" widescreen monitor, it's quite nice! Looking back, I laugh at the "XP Capable, Vista Ready" sticker that came on the laptop.

[James Thomas]

My name is James Thomas and I own an Averetec laptop that I purchased from Circuit City in 2005 for about $2000. The laptop has an 80 gig hard drive, 1 gig of ram, and is run by an AMD processor. Ok now to the good stuff, over the years the laptop has served me pretty well but now it is the most horrible and embarrassing thing I own. As a result in poor design or maybe just incompetence the structural integrity of the hinges connecting the screen to the laptop failed epically about a year ago, ]and for a while I made due with just propping the screen up against something when I needed to use the computer but as you can imagine, showing something to your friends or advisor on something like that just makes you feel like an idiot. Oh yea, I forgot to mention that I am a grad student working on a masters degree so I have to give presentations and show my advisor my progress often. The computer is so slow that it takes at least 3 minutes to boot into Xubuntu, yea I know ridiculous. I had to through Xubuntu on it because it just wouldn’t run Windows. To make matters even worse a couple of months ago the battery died and I can’t afford another so I have to always have it plugged into an outlet and the screen is about a pixel away from flat-lining too. If that wasn’t bad enough, the network adapter and the dvd drive are both broken, this thing might as well be a brick. Hell the only good news about the laptop is that the chassis gets so hot you could probably cook an egg on it, at least then it would be doing something useful. I wish I could just toss it but sadly I need this piece of crap.

[Chris Gravely]

My pc hasn't been working for about a year and a half.

I got a sweet 26 inch HDTV/monitor for Christmas, but I don't have a pc to hook up to it.

I ended up digging around inside the thing trying to fix it so much that I lost the screws to the side panel, it's next to the desk in that photo because it tends to fall off.

I have a few replacement parts that don't fit, so they just sit around next to and on top of it.

The parts that do fit don't work anyway.

After repeatedly being unable to boot it, sometimes able to get a blue screen, though, I settled for my dad's old Acer when he bought a new one.

This is what I'm using now, it's got a big nasty stripe up and down the monitor, as you can see, which I got used to.

There's no visible damage to the audio output, but any headphones or speakers I plug in don't work unless I rotate the jack into juuust the right spot, and then I have to make sure not to bob my head to the beat, or I'll lose the groove again.

On a related note, the built in mic seems to always be on, so any sounds I make, from typing to talking are spat back out to me from the barely working speakers.

The ethernet port is some kind of broken, I need to be careful not to move it around or the wire will slip straight out, wi-fi seems to have completely given up working long ago.

(In this shot you can also see my half destroyed Xbox 360, the disk drive stopped working and after fixing it myself it stopped working again, so I need to jumpstart the disk read process by spinning it manually)

The cherry on top is that the battery fried before my dad gave it to me, so the whole dang thing is about as portable as the power cord is long.

So there are my crappy PCs, America.

I've been using a hand me down iPhone as my primary connection to the internet, and I have to say, it's doing a much better job than either of these hunks of junk.

[Turaj Pilehvar]

Finally, a place where I can brag about the piece of crap on my desk. Get ready for shameless bragging, pitiful begging, and the story of the laptop with the biggest heart of all: Edwin.

(Not really. I mean, I do plan on making my case here, but I don't have that much of a heart tugging story here. And I suck at naming my electronics. Also, It's kind of sad that I name my electronics.)

This laptop was my christmas gift in 2005. My parents got it because I needed a "college computer" (whatever that means) and because I had been sharing the family desktop with...the family. It sucked. I babied this laptop for about 3 months before the newness wore off.

Then I went off to college and discovered beer. And the compile-your-own-kernel-for-some-reason Gentoo install. My suite mates and I decided that it would be a great idea to try out the manliest Linux install we had ever heard of, so we burned our ISOs, wiped our disks, and got cracking.

Three or four tries into the night, we got a proper kernel compile. Upon seeing the resultant output I jumped out of my seat to tell my comrades of my achievement. In my celebratory act, my laptop was pulled from the desk onto the floor by the power cord. The very same power cord tripped me and caused me to put a knee into the screen of my laptop, ruining it.

Fast forward to the present. I have managed to survive thus far by using lab computers, and an iPod touch that my room mate allows me to sync with his MacBook. I keep the old broken Presario around for nostalgia's sake. I can still SSH in and mess around with it, but no graphical output can be acheived via the VGA port (botched attempt at reseating the VGA connector, story for another day) and the screen serves as little more than an awesome dry erase board. My parents refuse to replace the laptop. They assumed that I broke it while drunk, because the fail to understand how someone could be so excited over something like a kernel compile.

This has been my unfortunate tale, which I hope brought much joy to you, the readers of Technologizer.

[Steve Kudelko]

I had a friend who had drunk people in her apartment and someone punched her MacBook's screen and it ended up looking like this. She had the AppleCare protection plan, and though I was pretty sure this repair wouldn't be covered, I tried sending it in to Apple, telling them that the screen was damaged and wouldn't display any video. You know what.... in 4 days, she had a repaired MacBook on her doorstep with no charge. Apple's warranty is fantastic. Anyone who likes to drink, has friends who like to drink, or is in a fraternity/sorority in college should buy an Apple, if only just for the warranty.

[J Beale]

The standard Apple warranty would not have covered it. However, since she had the AppleCare protection plan, which covers accidental damages, they replaced it for free. When I worked in the laptop repair center at a local university, I repaired many Dells and Lenovos with the same kind of damage that had a similar type of warranty, at no cost.

[Michael B]

I had a Toshiba Satellite Laptop and I booted it up and the screen made a crackle noise and then I saw a flash. My screen cracked in to about 6 pieces. I sent it back to the company for repair and they have the balls to tell me they could not repair it because they claimed it was abused. I never abused it. I babied that Laptop. I always carried it around in a heavily padded Targus case. It had never been dropped. They told me it was not covered and it would cost me $399 to repair. This was back in early 2007. I am still fighting with them to replace it. For $200 more I could have bought a brand new one.

[clement ogar]

It doesn't even have to be an old machine to fit into this category, case in point my really loved and completely busted Thinkpad T41. How is it possible that a laptop, built to IBM specs can be classified as lousy you ask? Well let me tell you....

A stronger machine you couldn't find anywhere, built like a tank, easy to open and update (and i did), bumped the cpu, hd, memory the whole shebang. I just loved that machine, had it running a tri boot (yeah you heard me) mish mash of OSes. All was fine until one glorious morning when... Freeze!

Blindsided by a freeze during some really intensive browsing/work related experience. Checked the mem, hd, battery, everything not bolted down, rebooted, and it worked flawlessly. Then right in the middle of my day, Freeze! Unresponsive except for the power button. Hmmmm..... Erased the HD and reinstalled everything from scratch,, funny no freezes. Booted up again and BAM! In your face sucker!

A google search revealed a strange flaw within this magnificent beast, the GPU flexed after a while and any movement during operation might result in the dreaded freeze. Lights popped up in my head, maybe i can wedge the sucker down (and i tried). After countless attempts with cut up plastic wedged under the keyboard and on top of the gpu, attempt with that liquid concrete mix, coins wrapped up in electrical tape, you name it i tried it. It would work, and on a relatively flat surface without any movement, when you least expect it, Freeze!

Had to result to punching the sweet guy just to reset the gpu, imagine the stares i received in cafe, a black guy punching a black laptop. Classic black on black violence i tell you what, but it worked for a while. Until one fateful day, when in a fit of really misplaced anger, cause a freeze negated a lot of work, i punched my beloved and she stopped working. Lost a hard drive and sweet laptop in the process..

Stuck with a MBP now, but i still miss my baby. RIP.

[Steve Kudelko]

You're STUCK with an MBP? I'd kill for an MBP right now. I had a MacBook Pro that I set on the roof of my car while I was packing and drove away with it on my car!!!!!! I checked everywhere and couldn't find it. That was my baby computer. Now I have a new 2.66GHz 20" iMac with 2GB of RAM (but I need so much more, but RAM is SO expensive for this computer) but I really miss mobility.

[Matthew]

Well, have I got a treat for you. I have two, count em, two of the worst PC s in America right in my bedroom. I have a ti99/a4(1982 ed, it even works) and a Cool IBM laptop that is barely capable of showing a Bsod before it dies. DOS anyone? I humbly present both before you today in the hope of winning this contest. You may ask why I have these utterly useless contraptions in my room, but i don't really know myself. there is nothing like the joy of having a working, sort of, laptop without an Ethernet jack in your possession. I cant even put Linux on it. Well, if I had a 5.25in floppy i could. I'd probably need a lot of them. Does anyone want to trade? Here is my proof:

(oh, my 99 is featured in your bad design hall of fame!!)

[Matthew]

my photos again: (sorry)

At least my laptop has a mouse.

There's also the story of my Compaq Armada (win98) melting in my lap, but alas, it is no longer with us.

I'm rockin the latest technology, jealous?

[Patrick Cody Yockey]

My Sister got mad at me one day and broke the monitor on my laptop.