I've had problems with various RAM manufacturers, and finally settled on Crucial, which while a little more expensive usually, hasn't failed me yet. Don't even think about buying Ebuyer's extra cheap own brand RAM.

I've also had no failures with any of my three seagate drives, and all three are over 3 years old. Come to think of it, I still have a Hitachi 4GB drive that is 8 or so years old and works fine :)

I've had one good, and one bad experience with ATI cards, the current card being the good experience thankfully. I heartily agree with Xai too on power supplies, don't ever go for the cheaper option.

My experiences with Alienware

I also will be avoiding ATI video cards until they learn how to write a decent driver. Seriously, the Radeon x600/x800/x1600 have the most unstable video drivers I've ever used.

Avoid the Aspire power supplies (not sure about the high end Aspires). I had two blow up on me. However, I think Aspire changed it's name. They disguised themselves...

I'll throw my vote in against ATI. I did not like their drivers at all.

Quote: Original post by Xai
...but now I have weird X-Fi problems. This card plays fine in every game I have except Guild Wars, which for no known reason just completely locks when I have the X-Fi enabled. I have to actually switch to my integrated sound to play it.

Guild Wars plays just fine with my X-Fi.

Quote: Original post by Xai
Oh yeah, 1 more thing, the most important too. Power supplies. Cheap power supplies have accounted for something like 30-50% of all problems me and my friends have experienced over the past 5 years, always check the power quality before wasting time with anything else. Better yet, but spend the money and get quality power.

Agreed. And the false marketing which so many PSU manufacturers use.

"We can dish out 1000W with our newest model! That is enough to power a Quadro SLI Nvidia 6800 setup. Buy it NOW! Oh you did? We forgot to tell you that our PSU can not supply enough amps to be able to run even one of those cards. Too bad!"

Quote: Original post by daviangel
I"d recommend Seagate any day since every HDD I ever bought from them is still working flawlessly to this day!

Second that. I had a 128MB Seagate HDD in my old 386 pc - running windows 3.1 with a colossal 4MB of ram - and it lasted until 2001! (That was when the BIOS died and took everything else with it.)

I'm not the type to totally reject a company once they messed up with me, but it will take some time and positive hearsay for me to be willing to give them another chance.

1. IBM / Hitachi - I had 5 or so IBM drives and not a single one of them lasted more than 18 months, under careful handling and active cooling. Following the recommendations of a friend, I switched over to WD. All of my WD drives to this day are still working (the oldest one being 5+ years in heavy use).

2. ATI - I really liked my Radeon 9800 Pro which was one of the models with an R360 (the XT chip) that overclocked very well, especially on water cooling ;). Next in line was a GeForce 6800 after which I returned to ATI with a Radeon X1950 Pro. Gothic 3 displays garbage on this card, Rainbow Six sometimes has funny triangles that look like an index buffer problem and when I use 4xFSAA, it crashes within approximately 2 hours.

3. Corsair - I bought 1 GB Corsair 3200 XLPRO with CL2-2-2-5 timings (which even today still cost $300+) and expected it to be super-stable high quality RAM. While my previous system running on Infineon DIMMs was rock-solid, I had lots of access violations in Oblivion (one every few hours). When I contacted Corsair support, I was told that those DIMMs needed 2,7 Volts to be reliable at those timings. Done that, got a noticable improvement in stability, but there's still some spooky behavior, like an occassionally corrupted file.

4. Logitech - This might be surprising, but imho, the quality of their hardware sucks. I had an MX-500 and am now using an MX-518. The 518's wheel is scraping in the side, the right button touches the middle panel and two of the glide pads have come off (and I'm not even resting my hand on the mouse). I'm going to try the Microsoft Habu next, because really like Razer and only the bad ergonomics have kept me away from their mice.

-Markus-

Quote: Original post by Cygon
4. Logitech - This might be surprising, but imho, the quality of their hardware sucks. I had an MX-500 and am now using an MX-518. The 518's wheel is scraping in the side, the right button touches the middle panel and two of the glide pads have come off (and I'm not even resting my hand on the mouse). I'm going to try the Microsoft Habu next, because really like Razer and only the bad ergonomics have kept me away from their mice.

Have you tried the MX-310? It's a "cheap" mouse, but I've been using mine for a few years now, and it works like it did out of the box. I'm using it on a pretty uneven desktop, and the glide pads are fine, and the optics work wonderfully, for me.

Their $20 headphones, however, aren't good at all. Understandable, because they're $20 headphones.

As for the Corsair RAM, my aunt (sales rep for Corsair, Abit and a few other companies, that's how I got my Abit gear) had some spare product samples, and I've been amazed with the Corsair XMS. Except for one stick, which, before my mobo fried, was paired with another similar to it. When I added another GB of XMS to my current gig, I would randomly get memory errors while playing certain games. I took out my "old" RAM, so I had 1 GB of the fast, low-latency RAM, and it worked.

I tried that GB in another computer, and one stick works fine, while the other will get errors.

However, they're product samples, not the actual released hardware, which might help to explain my hardware problems, both Abit and Corsair.

labtec, gah their stuff is shit, and their earbud headphones are surrounded by sandpaper rather than foam.

Logitech's headsets and webcams are pretty bad too. Starting to have problems with their speakers too(my Z-3's cord is getting loose then it lets out horrible feedback).

IIRC memorex had some pretty horrible cd-r's

XPlio and IPC are computer brand names to stay away from.


As for companies to stay away from I'm having a huge fiasco with Staples right now and I've been waiting since January for a power adapter for my laptop. Always a stupid response after another.

I've purchased a fair amount of eVGA recently and I must say that I've been happy with their product. I have both a mobo and card from them that work flawlessly and don't seem to have any problems.

I will also vouch for Seagate as I haven't had any issues with them either. Their hard drive is still going strong for me. I also purchased a Western Digital portable drive and its very sleek! I recommend it.

I've been lucky though. Haven't hit too many horror stories beyond a few defective video cables that weren't shielding properly.