Talking about Hi Fi equipment, VCR`s, DVD`s, anything electrical.

Worst piece of dogs doodah I ever bought, a long time ago, was a Sanyo BETAMAX VCR.

Looking at the recorded playback was like watching TV when you`ve had more than a few double whiskys.

Luckily, because of the crap picture, I managed to get it changed, and I picked a VHS model. As it turned out, VHS flourished, and Betamax just faded into oblivion.

The biggest piece of crap had to be a JVC Home DVD Recorder that I wasted $300 U.S. on. It always had this flashing in the info panel saying LOADING non-stop until it was unplugged to "remedy" the problem.

It even did that after sending it into the factory to get it "fixed" for free (probably just a flash update). Needless to say it finally got stuck with LOADING and it wouldn't go away so I threw the whole damned thing away and with a permanent magic marker I wrote on the top of the unit:
"This piece of s**t is broken! If you think it's a cool find think again!"

I remember getting B.S.B. [British Satellite Broadcast] I thought it was far better than Sky Broadcast. Like Betamax B.S.B. faded into oblivion.

The mistake there was buying Sanyo I assume as Betamax was the superior format with better picture quality than VHS.

I've always heard that too about it having better picture quality. It's really a shame that sometimes a format/product can loose out to something theoretically inferior quality-wise.

However I suppose that's sort of like all the stupid DVD formats DVD-/+ and now HD-DVD and Blu-ray, they must expect consumers to buy both as that's what will be required to playback everything. Round and round we go.

Yes, the mistake was buying Sanyo.

If I had chosen a decent quality VCR, with a decent playback, I would have been stuck with a VCR with nothing to put in it but blank tapes.

Not only was Betamax better with picture quality, but the actual construction of the tape mechanism itself was superior to VHS. Pity they didn't have a better promotions/publicity setup.

So you could say it was a stroke of luck picking a VCR with s***e picture quality.

Well, so far, there are only three people on this forum who have ever made a bad purchase.

Do me a favour.

Come on people, fess up and give us all a laugh.

Consumer electronics? I guess my last processor / motherboard were a bit useless.

Once bought in a £1 shop (cheap shop for our USA friends) an object which allowed you to plant lots of bulbs at the correct depth. It looked like a very small garden folk handle with measurements on the side.
Lined up all my bulbs pushed the planter in the ground and it promptly snapped in two.

Back to my usual tried and trusted method.

You were robbed.

A Solar rechargeable vibrator

Well since we got off the topic of just electronics and such....

a mobile home. my wife and i bought it for 10000 and lived in it for 8 years. it was terrible! the roof leaked when it rained so i had pots catch the water, i heated it with a wood stove so i had to chainsaw my wood and always keep the fire going in the winter and the floors were always freezing cold and it was always smoking hot near the ceiling. the water pipes routinely froze so i had to use a heat gun to unthaw them when the temperature got really cold. the walls were 2/3 construction without any vapour barrier and the frost would come through the walls-one morning i woke up and my pillow was frozen to the wall! the windows would ice up so you couldnt see out of them, and the doors would shift so i always had a draft coming through them. the drafts were so strong through the plug in sockets that you could put out a match! no joking!

the only good thing was that since it was so cheap we managed to save a bundle of money so when we moved into the city a few years ago we were able to get a really nice house with some nice furnishings without having any debts. but those were some rough times in that place!

I don't think we needed to know that.

By the way, that's a cool Moogle avatar you have!

Anyone own any of these:

10 worst pcs of all time:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129857-p...s/article.html#

I haven't, but I've fixed one of those crappy dells.

Haven't used any of them, but I almost got a Dell 4600 back in 2003 but it wouldn't hold all the components I wanted so I dumbgraded ("upgraded") to an 8300. All in all a cheaply made PC with a hefty price tag in my opinion.

The problems with dells is that they use the cheapest parts ever.
Most of the stuff they use you can't even buy anywhere except from them its so cheap.

i had the commodore vic 20.......

Yeah, there's nothing like proprietary cheapness!
Speaking of cheapness "junk parts", I'm going to have to call their tech support today because I'm starting to get those onscreen lines again just like I had 2-3 months ago when my display card died, I think it's the MOBO.

I thought they gave you a new mobo and video card last time? They must have given you refurbished parts or something...
At least you were smart and bought the add on warranty.

Well it's pretty much broken again, remember that screenshot from a couple of months ago it looks exactly like that if not worse.

After spending over two hours on the phone with tech support they're sending more parts.

If it does this again I'll probably be looking to get a new computer, this time it won't be a Dell though and I'd be putting in most of the parts to get exactly what I want and one thing I don't want is another ATI display card.

A Mac. Here's why: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant

Ok, did you really buy a mac and not like it, or was it just a joke?

I really did. A Mac II something, back in 1995 or so.

I bought a Sony DVD player about seven years ago (I still like Sony products) when DVD players were all expensive. I gave $200+ USD for it and it was nothing but trouble. I had disc errors, sometimes the audio wouldn't match the video, along with other problems. I decided to take it back way after the warranty. I was mainly just going back to complain not expecting much. As it turns out the sales associate had the same DVD player and had nothing but problems with it. She let me have my money back. Since the prices had come down on DVD players, I was able to get a new DVD player and two DVDs.

Currently this is the only kind of Mac I can afford, and peripherals for it are cheap too.

Well, windows 95 sucked too. (looking back anyway. I have an old 3.1 machine still and 95 was a big improvement to that. )
I was just interested, because I don't see many people who switch from windows nowadays to OSX and aren't happy.

Man I always think that if Win98 SE had been updated a little bit (change the file system, defrag engine, a few kernel updates), it'd have been 20x better than XP .

Thats because it wasn't the realistic portable Sony Betamax with wireless remote controll fastforward and rewind

(note I've never used one, I just noticed the advert on techeblog.com )