What's the WORST setup you've ever done/used/seen?

[Ole Juul]

The title of this thread is "What's the WORST setup you've ever done/used/seen?" so does that mean running new software (with higher demands) on old hardware (with lower capabilities) as has been suggested? It seems to me that you can get as better or worse as you like by the choices you make. Try running KDE on an old laptop. It's useless, but any sensible person would move in the other direction and use fluxbox. I'm sure MS-Windows users also can chose how well or badly their system runs by over or under specifying either the hardware or software. There's no surprises there. Personal choice the whole way.

I recently acquired a computer which had a fresh copy of Windows 7 Professional on it, so thought I'd give it a try. Now I have no real experience with this, but quickly discovered that I couldn't do anything useful with it because there were not all the utilities and programs that I take for granted. It didn't even have the famous "Word" on it which is what I was expecting. It seems you have to download and install that stuff, possibly even go out and buy it. That was a showstopper for me. Now somebody else with MS skills, and probably a collection of ready-to-go programs and utilities, would have called that a perfectly good setup because they would be willing to deal with it. To me it was just a "bad setup". Personal choice the whole way.

 

[Compgeke]

Windows 8 Consumer Preview (I believe) on a 633 MHz Celeron with 128 MB ram, or a downgraded Dell Optiplex GX150. Graphics were Monochrome, I ate up all the ram by doing nothing (as well as the cpu) and enjoyed 40 minute boot times.

As for hardware, I had to help someone who said their computer kept shutting down. They thought the computer was too loud so they wrapped it in a blanket, which was causing it to overheat and thermal shutdown.

And for a production system, a local organization is running their phones off a 286 machine with a full meg of ram. While it works, they're doing backups onto zip disks, which do work but not my favorite backup, I would rather have an entire hard drive backup than just the phone database they backup, can you just imagine trying to find the software anymore?

 

[Rick Ethridge]

I remember "attempting" to run Win98SE on my FIC Athlon motherboard. It constantly locked-up and ran funny. After I updated to XP it ran beautifully! I still don't know why.

 

[arrow_runner]

Ah, Windows ME. I remember that was the first time I had to make a backup of the boot partition because the OS croaked so much...

But with regards to the thread title, anything that's bad. Even flaky hardware or buggy software.

 

[Caluser2000]

I've got a 286 that drops it's serial ports about 5 minutes after it's switched on. Tried a number of i/o cards with no improvement.

 

[krebizfan]

In the annals of bad design, I would suggest the Compugraphic MCS. For those that don't recognise the concept, it consisted of a computer sharing a big case with a camera. The camera plus a film strip would size various fonts and take a picture of each letter gradually building up the entire document. The problem was a lack of cooling for the camera. A large document would run the camera so long that the entire enclosure would overheat crashing the formatting computer.

 

[DOS lives on!!]

Ah, Windows ME. I remember that was the first time I had to make a backup of the boot partition because the OS croaked so much...

Oh..., don't even remind me of SCANREG. It turned my opinion of ME from "okay" to "Miserable Edition." Plus then, the hard drive it was installed on went out two weeks later.

The worst setups for me is when people put the Apple //c monitor with any computer other that an Apple //c. It never looks fitting, especially when a big Apple ][e is running with a tiny //c monitor.

Other than that, there's the usual installing OS X on iMac G3s, putting XP on a Pentium II computer with 64mb of RAM that ran Windows 98 before (my favorite); and then seeing computers stuffed behind the computer desks, with piles of papers stacked onto it, and breeding loads of dust bunnies.

 

[creepingnet]

Getting the GEM 386, upgraded to an AT based Pentium 120, with the horrendous Trident TGUI-9440 PCI Graphics card, to work with ANY Monitor I had in the house! The only one that worked was this little no-name generic piece that could only stand that computer running at 640X480 @256 colors....reason being, the graphics card did not default to the standard 60 Hz refresh rate, but rather, bumped it up to 75 Hz, so none of my really old CRT light boxes were going to be happy with (almost all pre 1990 at the time). I remember having to turn the brightness and contrast full up just to faintly see Postal on that SVGA monitor...while it got worse and worse as I played as the phosphor burned out. Oh, and that craszy POS at the time had no serial port as the on-board did not work and I Already was using the ISA Slots for a sound card/modem combo and a network card, so I had to do ALL mouse work through "mousekeys" accessability feature, and the soundcard/modem combo was only 14.4K internaal (vs. my 486 with a 56K V.92 external modem that burned the netz up in those days)....thankfully, that grew to be my favorite box for many years after a few months of that hellish setup.

THe 2nd worst was the first PC I Built. It was a Kingspao baby AT Chassis with a "Flight 386 SX" case badge, and a ZEOS convertible motherboard setup for a 33MHz 486 CPU, 8MB of 30 pin FP RAM. IT had a 256K Paradise VGA Card in it, and a multi I/O card, and a 124MB Maxtor 7120AT HDD. I backed the whole mess up on 40 3.5" 1.44M Floppies so I Could recover anything I did not want to use off the hard drive at the time as I ran out of 124MB qute fast. AGain, the On-board Serials did not work, and I still had yet to learn IRQ/Memory Address setttings to get an external card (or the internal ports) working. So I installed AOL on that beast using versions 3.0, and 4.0, using a 56K V.90 USR Sportster external modem, hooked into an 8250 unidirectional serial-port. Anytime setup of the AOL account hit a snag that needed a mouse, I'd stop, close AOL, suffer a General PRotection Fault in Windows 3.1 (Doctor Watson was my best friend...and his file's been getting pretty large since 2001), then start the other copy to continue.

In other fun with that box, during the hot Alabama summers, I used to have to put a glass of ice water (on an absorbant cloth of course) on the top of the modem to cool it down due to that uni-directional port. It kept me from hearing that weedy man voice say "Goodbye" to me every 15 minutes of web surfing. In an hour, all the ice cubes would melt. I'm the only person I ever knew with a "Water cooled" external modem.

 

[marcoguy]

My worst setup EVER was a machine designed for Windows 98 running Vista... I would sometimes press the power button in the morning, then make myself an egg sandwich and eat it before coming back to the PC... It would still be booting. :crazy:

 

[deathshadow]

There are two client setups that come to mind from back when I was doing database programming and novell networking in the 90's.

The first was a 386SX with 1 meg of RAM and a 20 meg MFM hard drive -- running a COBOL application on Xenix to four WYSE dumb terminals. (VT-100 knockoffs). Previous years data was stored on this bizzaroland SCSI reel to reel tape setup, and the average query was taking over a minute just for current data. The screwed up part was they apparently blew 10k on having it moved to this from an old PDP-11 system. It was a ridiculous setup even for four years prior, much less only two, especially with the ridiculous amount they had paid for it.

Took me a week just to pull the prior data off it in a meaningful format, two days of staring at cobol code to reverse engineer how things were stored... and 2 hours to belt out a workalike in Borland Paradox 3.5... where it took 3 hours to let it 'cook' translating the old data to the new format. Replaced the machine with a 486 DX/50, netware 3.12, and a 540 meg hard drive -- the data fit on there with 400 megs to spare (not bad for a decade worth of client data) It let him get rid of having two monitors at every desk (next to the wyse terminal everyone in the office had AMD 386/40's or Intel 486/33's running Win 3.1).

That project was really the catalyst for the beginning of my hating all things *nix with the needlessly and pointlessly cryptic command line, useless MAN pages, and two decade out of date (at the time) methodologies for handling hardware.

The other setup that comes to mind was an office where we were adding another Netware 3.12 setup to an existing LAN -- where every machine was running OS/2. (2.2 I think, it was definately pre-warp). I was the only person in the company I was working for that had any OS/2 experience, but that was on Pentium equipped model 90's... I get there and the place is filled with model 70's that only had 4 megs of RAM... (two of the machines were 53's I think... 386SX) I told my boss just getting our typical paradox on netware talking to OS/2 was going to be a nightmare, but I had no idea how bad it was going to be on machines that took over a minute just to find a printer on the LAN before even sending data to it. It was truly one of those moments that showed exactly why Windows 3.1 kicked OS/2's ass in the business world. No matter how stable or 'superior' OS/2 was, small businesses lacked the money to get the hardware to use it in a meaningful fashion.

I actually had more trouble on that job getting their setup to talk to a HP LaserJet III than I did getting it talking to Netware... Most of that can be attributed to OS/2's decent DOS implementation and that we were still using Paradox for DOS at that point.

Did I mention both of those were at mortuaries? By the mid '90's that was my specialty, creating double entry accounting systems for Mortuaries. SCARY part is I know of at least two New England mortuaries who are STILL using my Paradox for DOS based accounting systems.

Most of my 'bad' hardware experiences come from those days -- where you had people who still thought "IBM won't steer me wrong", the transition from big iron to microcomputers -- but it still was never as bad as the experience of dealing with the clients themselves.

Like the 500 pound gorilla of a woman who covered her computer in refrigerator magnets, and managed to shove a Centronics D connector on upside-down.

 

[Chuck(G)]

In the annals of bad design, I would suggest the Compugraphic MCS. For those that don't recognise the concept, it consisted of a computer sharing a big case with a camera. The camera plus a film strip would size various fonts and take a picture of each letter gradually building up the entire document. The problem was a lack of cooling for the camera. A large document would run the camera so long that the entire enclosure would overheat crashing the formatting computer.

The MCS was state-of-the-art for its time--I think I still have a disk for one. I used to have a couple of document disks with the text in Hebrew--I never did figure out the coding for those.

 

[barney]

I bet if the 386sx16 was running dos and Geoworks may have pleasurable experience.

The silly things we do when we are young. Mind you my 286/16 with 4 mb of ram ran win3.1 ok.

Running RH 7.3 on a P200mmx was painful until I ditched Gnome/Nautilus as the default desktop setup. Went to Window Maker with some carefully selected Gnome 1.x programs, some terminal programs along with Opera and it was a lot better. Still is and can give some later systems a good run. On the bright side it correctly detected all the hardware on the machine as well.

How the heck did you get Windows 3.1 installed on your 286? I tried and it kept saying that it needed a 386 processor to install. I gave up and installed Windows 2.0 on my 286.

 

[Ole Juul]

The silly things we do when we are young. Mind you my 286/16 with 4 mb of ram ran win3.1 ok.

As I recall 4Mb was very common and quite adequate. In fact I think it was the suggested amount and 8Mb was considered very good.

How the heck did you get Windows 3.1 installed on your 286? I tried and it kept saying that it needed a 386 processor to install. I gave up and installed Windows 2.0 on my 286.

He probably used Windows/286. I think I might have a copy of that somewhere, though I'm unlikely to try it. I loaded one of those early Windows versions once on something with an amber MDA. I was surprised at how good it looked. In fact I thought it looked better than the VGA version. I was also surprised that it could be operated without a mouse, although that was really cumbersome. Like you say, "the silly things we do when we are young". I was probably 40 at the time and didn't have a mouse to plug in if I had wanted to.

 

[Caluser2000]

No it was Win3.1. Intially with DRDOS 6.0(with patch), then later MSDos 6.22. The doughters should read the system requirements. Here's MS Hardware compatibilty list http://support.microsoft.com/kb/83210 Seems others on this planet have done the same too- http://www.itlisting.org/5-windows/f9cf4a71d46fac9f.aspx

Work had it on 386sx class machines. I managed to get a discounted oem package(Osbourne-still have the disks btw) and installed it on my 286/16 in barracks.

Win/Wfw 3.11 dropped 286 standard mode support http://support.microsoft.com/kb/89333

That 286/16(clam shell case) machine ended up with co-pro, 512kb video card/SVGA monitor, 240meg hdd, modem, cdrom, sound card, 51/4 along with a 3.5" fdds and 4megs(SIPPs) of ram before the mobo was replaced with a second hand 486 board. I desoldered the pins on the sipps for reuse in the replacement board. The 286 came with 9 pin dot matrix printer as a bundle and eventually bought a Deskjet 500.

 

[Caluser2000]

As I recall 4Mb was very common and quite adequate. In fact I think it was the suggested amount and 8Mb was considered very good.

Most systems when win3.1 was released were still being shipped with 1 or 2 megs of ram. 4megs on a 286 was pretty unusual in our neck of the woods with 8 megs a rarity on 386s up and was the sweet spot for win3.1. Of course that soon changed.

 

[Ole Juul]

Most systems when win3.1 was released were still being shipped with 1 or 2 megs of ram. 4megs on a 286 was pretty unusual in our neck of the woods with 8 megs a rarity on 386s up and was the sweet spot for win3.1. Of course that soon changed.

Now that I think about it, 4Mb was indeed a pretty good amount and not everybody had that much. I don't think I ever ran into anybody with 8Mb in those days. Also, like you said Win3.1 would run on a 286. My knowledge of the existence of Win3.1/286 is recent. Back then I hadn't heard about it, and lots of my friends had 286s with Win3.1.

 

[Shadow Lord]

Original 5160 w/ 640kb memory and 10mb HDD/360KB FDD upgraded with a NEC V20 running Win 3.0 or win 3.1 I forget now - That was painful. Usually that setup would last a total of 5 minutes as I basically did not have room for anything else on the HDD!

 

[Caluser2000]

Now that I think about it, 4Mb was indeed a pretty good amount and not everybody had that much. I don't think I ever ran into anybody with 8Mb in those days. Also, like you said Win3.1 would run on a 286. My knowledge of the existence of Win3.1/286 is recent. Back then I hadn't heard about it, and lots of my friends had 286s with Win3.1.

I had Geoworks Pro on the same 286 at the time. It performed better but had nowhere near the amount of available software or support for 256 colours. The Geoworks Pro suite was quite good though.

 

[Bungo Pony]

I used to have a lot of people come to me with their computer problems. Usually the problem was that they had installed Norton Antivirus on their P2 or P3 machine. Norton would drag the computer down to an absolute crawl. The moment I removed Norton, the computer started functioning as if it was brand new.

I still occasionally find computers in the garbage and bring them home. Many of them are P2s or P3s with Norton installed.

 

[mechanizeddeath]

Probably my own.

For starters, in 1998 I was still using a 286. Everyone and their brother was on Win9x and I was still using the DOS prompt to dump my college papers out to LPT1 while my 9pin Epson wailed like a banshee. Good times.

A few years later, around 2001, I was taking some programming classes. By then I had retired my 286 and was using an early Athlon, but really wanted a dedicated Linux box for programming so I didn't have to deal with the hassle of dual booting. A friend of mine gave me a free computer, but it had been sitting outside for about 2 years. Aside from being filled with spiders, the even scarier thing was the internal layout.

The computer was from a company called "Nexar". Their website is still available on the wayback machine if you've never heard of them, but basically they had a proprietary design that involved a slotted two piece motherboard. When you wanted to upgrade, you opened a door on the side, slid out the slotted half of the motherboard, and replaced it with a newer one. The back half had things like the IO ports and power supply connectors, while the front half contained the CPU and RAM.

You can imagine the potential issues caused by separating the motherboard into two pieces, with hundreds of contacts on each side. Especially on a computer that had sat outside in the elements for a while. I cleaned the connector as best I could, but I think a lot of my stability issues were due to corrosion on that stupid connector. It was like the problems with NES cartridges, only worse.

On top of that, I was a Linux newbie at the time, and knew absolutely nothing about it, especially with regard to optimization. I had only used KDE, which was installed on the workstations at my college, so I was trying to run KDE on a 200MHz CPU with probably 16MB of RAM. Painful, so very very painful.