Hardware vendors to avoid

I suspect this will end up being “PC hardware manufacturers” rather than the actual thread title by post 50 or so, but ah well.

I just tried to go to the Mushkin page to see if they had a warranty for my dead less-than-2-year-old SSD that I could try collecting on.

Uncloseable popup about SECURITY WARNING YOUR BANK ACCOUNT blah blah ALT+F4. I’m going to take that as a “no” on the warranty. Dicks.

H&T posters are probably also aware of my crusade against cheap Chinese garbage peddler ZOTAC, who refused to RMA a clearly defective 970 and resorted to straight up lying about the email interactions I had with them when I took to Twitter to bitch. Fuck them.

Who else sucks? I mean, besides Dell (duh).

I suspect these things fluctuate over time, but my perpetual “avoid” list has MSI and ASRock right at the top. My experiences with both manufacturers involved a lot of running back and forth from Fry’s returning defective motherboards. They price so aggressively, though, that it’s hard to resist.

I’ve learned my lesson and just stick with Gigabyte, who’ve yet to let me down.

What Muskin page did you go to? I just went to their support ticket system and got nothing of the sort. Hell I didn’t even get a single block with uBlock.

http://poweredbymushkin.com/SupportCenter/open.php

I own 2 Zotac 970s. No issues, but next time I am just going back to EVGA. I think I will buy my next motherboard from them as well, because that’s the RMA process I want to go through if I have to.

I remember getting bit by shoddy Goldstar equipment in the 90’s,and have refused to buy anything by them or their new name LG ever since.

It does sound like under LG they have gotten better and I may finally cave for an OLED 4k tv later this year.

I think you may need to do a malware scan on your system

I was thinking the same thing, but hoping he just followed the wrong link from Google.

Oh probably. I severely doubt my system is compromised after literally formatting a fresh new SSD with a clean Win10 install two days ago, and following my usual browsing habits that have gotten me zero infections over the last decade, and seeing no such weird behavior anywhere else.

I still won’t buy a Seagate hard drive.

Ditto.

Double Ditto.

That’s just common sense after the backblaze data on their 3tb drives

The thing is, every HDD manufacturer had a shit drive that failed in droves at one point or another; only HGST I think as an exception. Seagate happened to be the most recent in memory, which is fair.

Saitek had been on my $#17 list because, when my X52 Pro joystick stopped working, they didn’t offer any kind of repair. They’d fix a joystick under warranty, but once the warranty was over, you were SOL if it broke. Which might be acceptable for a $39 stick, but not a $200+ HOTAS setup.

Just discovered that Logitech bought them last year, though, so maybe their policies have gotten better.

(Weird that Logitech discontinued joysticks after the awesome G940 and then buys Saitek a couple of years later…)

Can’t comment on their TVs but their fridges and microwaves work well enough!

This.

If you go back long enough, you can’t buy anything, if you think about it logically. Basically every manufacturer has probably had a faulty line, but if not that, they have certainly had someone who bought a product that died prematurely to no fault of the customer.

Emotionally i don’t buy seagate harddrives because i bought a drive from a faulty line probably 15 years ago. I also probably don’t buy asrock boards (for either servers or my gaming pc) because the server board i bought a while back bricked itself. I imagine i could work past that grudge though.

HGST had the Deathstar incident. That affected me.

Wasn’t that IBM?

ASRock motherboards are a gamble. Your PC might be rock solid and never BSOD, but you’ll have a fan connector go dead for no reason. Or your USB peripherals will stop working on reboot (I had to install a 3rd party USB card). Or you’ll try to shut down your PC and it reboots instead. Little things like that add up and will drive me back to ASUS or Gigabyte for my next upgrade.

now can someone tell me in my other thread who not to avoid for SSD and HDs?

You have to avoid them all.