Poll! Worlds worst custom machine???

[pbuckne 0]

The guys at the shop came up with the worlds worst possible custom configured machine. If it's not the worst, it's gotta be close.

 

We decided that if ECS built a current motherboard that would run cyrix, and was entirely usb, no ps2 or parallel controllers, that would be a good start.

 

Add some cheap ram, your choice.

 

Put in a maxtor harddrive and cable it to a packard bell CDrom, something from the P166 era, 4x or so.

 

Add a Hyperion based PCI IDE controller and put a Futjitsu and Samsung harddrive, one on each, then a Gateway CDburner, and an Emachine DVD

 

Add an HP combo card for sound and modem.

 

Integrated NIC from ECS, of course, one with a guaranteed memory leak.

 

Load Windows ME to really get things rolling, but be sure to install it under the FAT 16 format, to make things really interesting.

 

add Roxio GoBack, then Norton System Works, then McAfee Firewall, TrendAway Antivirus 90 Day Trial, and top it off with any version of AOL you care to mention. Just to be truly evil, add Bonzai Buddy, with Bearshare for the final blow.

 

Remember, this is a poll, if it isn't the most evil machine you have ever seen, customize it with your own hardware. May the worst machine win!

[genaldar 0]

Any Dell laptop

[jmmijo 1]

Pretty much any NLX based motherboard will suck so you can base it on one of these if you wish.

 

I'm trying to get rid of a few left-overs myself, they are Asus motherboards but the NLX form factor kills them, also they are socket 370 which isn't too bad but only supports older Coppermines and below.

 

To really mess things up here you can use the ISA slots on the NLX rider card, yes Riser card and throw on one of those Jean Luc Picard-Bell Sound Card/Modems, they usually were the Washington models with a Sound Blaster not very compatible sound chipset and an integrated Rockwell chipset for the 28.8 WinModem.

 

I'll go with a P3-667 and DMI the bios so it reads the correct 666MHz instead

 

Memory will be any cheapo PC100 DIMM, perhaps one of the Taiwanese brands that I came across with the other day, no name just Greek Symbols: Alpha + Omega

 

Since the board does have onboard gfx we'll use that but to maximize the shared memory we'll be sure to limit the frame buffer size to 1MB even if it supports 8/16/32/64MB. It will only be a 32MB dimm as well, we don't want to spend more then a buck or two on the memory.

 

Of course the onboard AC97 sound gets used, but we need to disable both the SB compatibility mode and the MIDI interfaces in the BIOS first. This should jack around with some game and/or music apps.

 

As for the HD, I found some old recycled Conner 850 and 1GB drives, this should suffice for our purpose, we only want to use the older UDMA33 cables anyways correct. Since we don't want speed we'll disable the onboard IDE channels and go with an old generic 16-bit ISA controller. Be sure to setup the jumpers properly for all the com ports too cause we have to disable these on the motherboard as well.

 

Now if the onboard graphics is too fast we can change that but adding a 1MB Cirrus Logic PCI card, since we just ran out of our two free ISA slots we'll use the only other slot available, the PCI slot.

 

Now the os, I've decided on MS-DOS 5, yes 5 and Windows 3.11, not the Workgroup Edition however I've also decided that more HD space is needed but we're cheap right, so we decided on installing Stacker instead. That'll get a nice fat TSR going, sorry but we can't have QEMM installed on this box can we.

 

Win 3.xx will only have the standard VGA driver installed for glorious 16 color VGA mode cause we can't figure out how to install the correct graphics drivers can we. Also we've decided to add Norton Desktop along with PC Tools Deluxe v7 so that means we had to add a 5.25" floppy drive as well and wouldn't you know it, we messed up the floppy cabling and can only get the config to work with the 5.25" drive as A: and the 3.5" drive as B:

 

As for the case, well guess what, who has NLX cases anymore, we decided to use cardboard instead, I used zip ties to keep things bundled together and colored ones too so they look purdy

 

As for the power supply, I found an old dented slimline case with a 145 watt PS, that should do, first I'll blow out the caked on woolys and grime, ah, a little 409 helps here.

 

The CPU heatsink fan I scavenged from an old socket 5 P100 so that should work, the heatsink looks a little small and so does the 40mm fan but hey it should work just fine.

[sapiens74 0]

The worst I ever saw was

 

 

PCCHIPS Socket 7 with onboard

 

Lan

Video

Modem

Sound Card

Memory, thats right Memory. Came with 64 Welded on

 

Was the biggest POS I ever worked on

 

Top it of it was in a mini AT case with a CDROM that you couldnt boot with, nor had DOS drivers, and a floppy that would take only every other disk

 

 

All this was brand new.

[Copernicus 0]

Well this ATX Mid-Tower that I had would diffinally be one of the worst. Not only was it heavy, it was very cramped with either a EPOX 8KHA+ or Asus A7V8X in it. I'm a lot happier that Lian-Li PC-60 than that other case.

[techie32 0]

Lets not foreget the good ol' MWAVE from IBM... them's brutal.

[sapiens74 0]

PCCHIPS is the worst company ever

 

 

They gave a new meaning to cheap systems

[Tomay 0]

Quote:

Put in a maxtor harddrive and cable it to a packard bell CDrom, something from the P166 era, 4x or so.

What's so bad about maxtor HDD's?

I have a pcchips mobo i440EX, a real killer.
There is one good I'd like to mention: My QDI Zilliox9 mobo (i440ZX chipset) displays my celeron700 as a XEON processor
BTW no bios update to fix this. YET

[Reidyn 0]

Jimmijo,

 

THAT'S the way to yank out the old moldy memories in a painful sort of way!! But if you really want agony, forget about the onboard sound and video... that's too much luxury in one machine. Maybe we would prefer an old 128k Trident ISA video card that you could never find stable drivers for, and any POS sound card from the now-defunct Reveal or any of the other crappy redistributors of the early 90s that had crummy SB emulation.

[jmmijo 1]

@Reidyn,

 

If I remember correctly, Raveal always rebadged their products, I seem to recall they used to put a sticker over the chipsets like on their so-called Ensoniq Soundscape ViVo cards as well as some of the more generic Cirrus Logic and Analog Devices ISA cards

 

Of course I still have a few older ISA cards lying around, I use them for testing mostly, but not too much of that either. I think I have a 256k VGA card that can be upgraded via empty RAM sockets...

 

Now for a classic HD spotting moment:

 

I have an old Seagate 3.5", SCSI-I drive, the true Half-Height models, runs at I believe 3600RPM and has an access time of 40ms. The old ST157N model, it's been dropped once or twice on the floor, a couple of small dents in the mounting bracket but it still works Last used in my Amiga 4000 thank you very much, still no bad blocks, other then the ones mapped out at the factory and the date of manufacture is 1988

[pmistry 0]

My friend had a pretty crappy computer....

 

Lucky Star, SLOT 1 motherboard, this board had 1 PCI slot, 0 AGP slots, and 1 ISA slot, and 1 AMR slot. It also had 1 parallel, 1 serial, and 2 USB ports.

Celeron 333MHz

32 MB PC66 Memory, cheapo brand

Integrated video on the motherboard, some SiS variety, that used system RAM for video RAM, so he had 24 MB of usable system memory

Integrated audio and modem, via the AMR slot.

16-bit ISA network card.

 

The funny thing is that I tried to give him my old ATI 2 MB PCI card, because it would give him better performance than the crappy onboard video, plus free up some memory, but his PCI slot was not usable because it was actually a PCI/ISA shared slot! Imagine that, you have 1 PCI and 1 ISA slot only on your motherboard and you have to choose one, and he already had a LAN card in the ISA.

 

Sad...

[Ali 0]

Quote:

The worst I ever saw was


PCCHIPS Socket 7 with onboard

Lan
Video
Modem
Sound Card
Memory, thats right Memory. Came with 64 Welded on

Was the biggest POS I ever worked on

Top it of it was in a mini AT case with a CDROM that you couldnt boot with, nor had DOS drivers, and a floppy that would take only every other disk


All this was brand new.

PC Chips it the world best seller motherboaard, and is one of the biggest problems for the entire computer industry!!!!

At work they are known as PCSH**s and as soon as you get an err. massage you know you should be changing the motherboard!

the worse retail computer that you can buy is from Shopping Channel network (in Canada). I work for MDG computers and The Shopping Channel buys $500 Value systems from MDG adn sells them for $1200 to $1600 CAD. The mother board is MoboStar (MDG Stores only sell Intel motherboards), and it' the brother of PC-CHIPS!

[Ali 0]

Quote:

PCCHIPS is the worst company ever


They gave a new meaning to cheap systems

That's sooo true, i wish i could send that to PC-Chips. do you know how much crap i have been trough with that board!!! AND their server that is supposed to be their support website is brodcasting wrong drivers from the bottom of Atlantic ocean!!! (so slow and down most of the time).
they have improved a little bit on the speed side (still not good at all), but i still end up getting wrong drivers from them for the board they manufactured themselves!!!

[sapiens74 0]

Thier website is pretty damn slow

[kellinjar 0]

My first PC

8086 10 mhz

4 color CGA monitor integrated.. I don't even think it had onboard ram..maybe 64k or something

20 mb harddrive

ms dos 3.2

basica

5.25disk drive

no mouse

640 k ram

after 3 years the monitor started showing red all the time.. you had to hit to make it turn the proper color

(eventually I soddered it to fix it)

the switch went on it ..so I bipassed it

the only phat thing on it was an external 14.4 USR robotics Modem...

(which was purchased later)

Original purchase price of this beast: $2000 Cdn in 1988

(this was a samsung as well btw)

oh eyah I think it came with a sweet dot matrix printer 1 page an hour or something

the modem was $300 new in like 1990 I believe

or around there (its been so long)

[videobruce 0]

One that is running YOL (Yuppies On Line), Norton Anti Virus, and Idiot Exploiter at the same time!

[zoltar100 0]

Radio shack CoCo.