The biggest computer/gaming mistake you have ever made.

[craigix]

I once paid £500 for 4MB of RAM for my Amiga500 in about 1993 with dreams of using it with the finest animation software, so I could become a computer animation god.


Nothing supported it and it made most programs which did support it randomly crash.


The money was all my birthday and Christmas money combined.


I still wince when I think about it today. I still have the RAM module. I just can't let it go.


What computer/gaming disasters are you guilty of?

 

[Sugar_Kane]

I've pee'd hundreds away on PC components in my lifetime. A local shop once convinced me to buy a new motherboard for £90 to make doom run faster, I was sceptical but the guy assured me it would work, it did nothing.


I once spent £200 on a graphics card that I realised too late was only marginally better than the one I already had.

 

[Mygames19]

About a year ago, my Grandpa gave me the option to have his old computer, or $200 bucks. His PC was better then mine on all fronts: More RAM, better processor, newer OS, the works. Only problem is that, sometimes, the computer would BSOD.


Now, it being my Grandpa (Who knows things about computers but seems to have problems actually applying his knowledge) I figured I could find and solve the BSOD problems.


HAHA, ya.


At first, it seemed fine. But then as time went on, the blue screens become more frequent, to the point that absolutely no video editing could be done without a BSOD somewhere along the way. I figured it might be a video card or audio card thing, so I spent a day tracking down Drivers for my computer's parts... only to find they barely helped at all.


So then it was just me tinkering. I dual-booted it with XP to see if it had similar problems, I installed updates for ALL Drivers, I did research one the error codes I'd get from the screens...


At this point, two weeks has passed and I was still back at square one. I finally decided it was time to bring in the big guns: The technicians.


My dad knows a lot of people, and some of them happened to be techs. So we called up a guy, who eventually hauled it off and returned it within a week, claiming to have fixed it.


Seemed like he had at first... the blue screens were more infrequent. But when I needed it for that video editing... nope. It started all over again.


We called the technician and let him know it was still having problems. So he took it, looked at it for about 4 days and then called us back with the unfortinate news that it had something to do with the motherboard. He basically outright said it'd be more expensive to repair the current PC then to just buy a new one. So as a kinda 'pity' gift, he gave us this really... aged PC with specs no where near the computer we wanted to fix was at.


So, I guess I should go back to the old PC then... right?


Well, fate was not on my side.


The PSU was out. I didn't have a spare PSU to swap with at the time, nor do I even know how to exchange one PSU for another, so both me and my parents threw up our arms in disappointment. We ultimately ended up having to buy a PC within a 2 week ratio for a summer job I was doing, so we hurriedly gathered together the cash to buy a pretty cheap PC. The same one I'm using now to type this message.

 

[mcobit]

It's always the PSU, which you can get for around 50 bucks. The first thing I do, when stuff like this happens is to check all the capacitors on the mobo and in the PSU.

 

[Nintendo]

A couple of years ago I purchased one of these for $600...

Regrettably.

 

[Ziz]

Australian or US American Dollars?

 

[Nintendo]

Aussie.

 

[Sugar_Kane]

at the current exchange rate, 600 Aussie $ equates to roughly one medium sized potato

 

[Nintendo]

 

[mcobit]

Looks identical to me

 

[Blue Protoman]

N-Gage. Enough said.

 

[Ziz]

Oh, i liked the N Gage games... Played them often on my Siemens SX1 :>

 

[Nintendo]

Splinter Cell was my personal favourite.

 

[Gruntfuggly]

Tiger game.com...

 

[SoulFire9001]

Back then when I didn't know about computer brands, I had the option to get a Compaq laptop or wait a week for Dells to ship in (they were out at that moment) for the same price. I got the Compaq, and I can just say I learned my lesson. It would overheat in about 20 minutes when I played the VBA emulator. I went through 6 chargers. One of those just split open near where you plug it in the computer and started smoking from that hole. The battery had eventually died, so I couldn't charge it anymore, and that's when I stopped using it. All of this happened within 8 months.

 

[Darkknight512]

I think the only big mistake I have made when choosing parts for my computer is my choice of a Gigabyte P43 UD3L instead of a P45. My chip wants to clock higher but the motherboard is at the FSB wall.


Other then that, I regret building a mid-tower and hoped I built a SFF pc.

 

[Prometheus]

From the perspective of buying something that ultimately never offered anything to my personal tastes, I'd have to say that investing in the Dreamcast was a mistake on my part. It never got one single game that was of any interest to me, so it was a very bad buy. I'm happy that it offered something for others, though.

Tiger game.com...

Also, this. But this one actually held more interest for me than the Dreamcast did, believe it or not.


I genuinely fell for the hype and thought that it would amount to something that would be a worthwhile supplement to my beloved Game Boy and all of the great games that I had for it. Having re-watched the old TV ad for the Game.com recently, I can only ask, "What was I thinking?!". :lol:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9AFcUA3bdCE?feature=oembed

^ This is the ad that was run in the UK prior to the launch. I can only assume that I only paid attention to the potential of the software line-up (not realising that everything in it was a poorly-made-by-Tiger-Electronics facsimile, due to the licenses that they held for making LCD game adaptations), and not to the godawful "IN YER FACE!!!!!" style of presentation.


I actually ended up getting a refund where it, and the support for it, was so goddamn bad (I mean both games-wise, and manufacturer-wise: For example, to the best of my knowledge, no further games for the device actually ever made it to retail in the UK even though they were advertised alongside the machine, as you can see above, and were supposed to be released here shortly after the machine itself; And, one of the included pair of pack-in games was not released in time to be packed-in due to last-minute bug-fixing, and when it *was* eventually shipped out, it was still a buggy, non-working mess, which crashed when you got a few steps into the second level. It did mean that you ended up with another game as a substitute, so you had three, but that only meant that you had three crappy games instead of two crappy games). I remember quite well that it was actually outside of Argos' "no quibble" period of the time, and yet they were very quick to sort it out and didn't quibble at all. Funny, that. I can only guess that they had had quite a lot of them back!


EDIT: Fixed the missing video! Sorry about that!

 

[slaeshjag]

I recently killed a brand-new motherboard with metal filings. Then I got a replacement that didn't work with NVidia graphics drivers under linux. I ended up getting a third motherboard with new CPU+RAM, which thankfully seems to work fine...

 

[Night]

Nothing too horible happend with me, thankfully..
Well, this one time i thought the good old Earthworm games i knew would have some more spice to them in 3D, so i did buy a copy of Earthworm Jim 3D when it was sort of new. But it turned out to be nothing but the same frustrating stages and boss fights over and over again, just with diffrent background.

Was kind of a let down..

 

[Null]

I bought a copy of Rise of the robots, with my own money.