PC World 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0,aid,125772,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0,aid,125772,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp</a><br /><br /></div><i>"At PC World, we spend most of our time talking about products that make your life easier or your work more productive. But it's the lousy ones that linger in our memory long after their shrinkwrap has shriveled, and that make tech editors cry out, "What have I done to deserve this?" Still, even the worst products deserve recognition (or deprecation). So as we put together our list of World Class winners for 2006, we decided also to spotlight the 25 worst tech products that have been released since PC World began publishing nearly a quarter-century ago."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/disgust-face.jpg" /><br /><br />There's some great stuff on this list - it's hilarious what these companies thought they could get away with. Definitely a must read - and fess up if you owned any of the items listed. I have not-so-fond memories of my Iomega drive doing its "click of death" dance, fighting with the evil RealPlayer, but that's about it from the list. What about you?

[Darius Wey]

Cursed Zip drive. No, mine didn't click its way to death. The format is just so dead now that it's not doing anything other than collecting dust in the spare 3.5" slot of my case.

[Chris Gohlke]

Put me down for RealPlayer, IE 6, SoftRAM, PointCast, Comet Cursor, and CueCat (still in a drawer but never actually used). I'm guessing they won't be running many AOL ads after making that the winner (loser)

[sojourner753]

I briefly had AOL but soon went over the wall when I subscribed to Comcast. I would like to thank Richochet for openning my eyes to broadband and inspiring me to escape.

I did have Windows ME, but that was because it came on my laptop. I quickly upgraded to Windows 2000.

I actually liked PointCast before they re-wrote it into something else. As for "push" technology, I think is still mostly a sham. Most things are really "pull".

ZipDrive: It never did the click of death, but it just became a hassle to deal with. The things still worked when I retired it.

[Damion Chaplin]

Tried RealPlayer. Hated it.
Suckered in by SoftRAM and Windows Me.
IE 6: unsecure as all hell, but we all still used it. I still have 3 sites I have to visit that require activeX controls. :?
I remember wanting a PCjr at the time 'cause of the cute ads. Now I'm glad I stuck to my C64.
Went through 5 Zip Drives. Sure glad that's over. 8O

Can I tell you how happy I am that AOL made #1?

[jeffd]

point cast rocked. It was the only form of an electronic newspaper around, that is, I could connect my laptop online, synch it, and then goto my job where I could kill 2 hours reading it offline. Screen saver might have been buggy, but who would use the screen saver? well aside from it being enabled when its installed, you should disable it, theres no point in having it, especialy since it loaded most of the programs code and it was a pretty big program.

I think everyones been on AOL at some point or another. I actually was on it back in the hayday. You see, AOLs parent company is..or was called quantum computer services, the makers of Q-link, the online service for the C64 of wich I spent so much time and money on. I heard about aol from my friends on Qlink and when I got my first pc, I picked it up. So I was on AOL when it didnt even have net access yet (I think email was able to transcend to the net. ) I had it for a little while, but the hourly charges sucked, and I wanted net access so I droped AOL for my first ISP, a national startup called Cris BBS (running major BBS, we could run 4 player Doom2 games and a full shell, and it had fake SLIP for TCP/IP winsock access). I droped Qlink and sold my C64 and games for a lightning fast 14.4 best data modem for my 486. ;)

Windows ME, I ran it on many older laptops, allways worked fine for me (though a few of the installs did suddenly became corrupt and killing windows compleatly). ME allways seemed like a Win98 with all the current patchs and updates to IE.

[EscapePod]

1) Had AOL for a long time, until the Internet came along. Then, I used ExecPC in WI, and Bellsouth in FL -- both with dialup, neither with pre-configured content.

2) Had to constantly "remove" RealPlayer from corporate PCs. Hated it then -- HATE it now. I refuse to patronize any company or host that uses any form of RealPlayer.

4) Windows ME was on my wife's PC for 2.5 years without a single flaw. Guess we were the ONE lucky PC owner who never had the problems everyone talks about.

8) Other than the multiple pop-up windows, IE 6 never gave me any trouble. Sure, it should be more secure --- but only because of the scum that walks the face of the earth with the only purpose in life to hack other peoples' PCs. I don't blame IE 6 for that. I blame God for not striking them down at their filthy keyboards.

15) I have two Zip Drives, one internal (still in the original box, unused) and one USB external (used once for who knows why). Also, a box of 14 unused 100 MB Zip disks. No sense in ever using them now.

[Felix Torres]

A bit biased towards contemporary turkeys; and instead of dinging Apple for Newton, they should've brought out the Apple III (100% failure rate!) and Colecovision (95% failure rate).
Instead of dBase IV they should've focused on Framework, which is what killed Ashton-Tate, or Lotus Symphony.
And yeah, Audrey was kinda cool; but it really needed WiFi to take off.
A bit ahead of its time.
At least it was better than eVilla, which should realy be a top-five entry.
Brings back memories, though.

As for Window ME, I ran it and saw it run flawlessly on dozens of boxes. As long as you didn't install anything from iOmega, Comet, Real, Symantec, or Aol.
Tells you something right there. ;-)

[David Horn]

Windows Me. I quite liked it. Have to use RealPlayer to listen to BBC radio streams, and IE6, which I used up until the point I fixed PocketGamer to render properly in Mozilla browsers.

Since then, I haven't touched it and Bon Echo beats IE7 hands down. Can't see myself ever going back to IE.