The Worst 25 Tech Products

You left out Quicktime. "No, I DON'T want to install three extra services I'll never use. No, I don't want to subscribe to itunes. Why won't you uninstall?"

Great article, maybe Philips CD-i of the early 90's could make the worst 50 list...

what about KaZaa, which spied on you?

You obviously missed out on the Nichion bad caps disaster of 2005 that caused businesses all across america to call their PC supplier and ask "Is there going to be a recall?". Dell, Gateway, IBM, Apple, and even HP were all hit by this bad batch of Nichion capacitors that were placed into millions of motherboards across the U.S. The best part about it though was the fact that the problem did not show its self until roughly 300 days of use when you would either get random power failures or the wonderful smell of something burning and the great sight of a bursted capacitor.

Link's Interactive Network? The whole notion of interacting with TV when all that meant was voting on trivial things that were often inconsequential ad hoc components to often really bad programming.

Sadly, "interactive" add ons were gimmicks that assumed bad ideas poorly implemented with bad technology could jazz up interest for bad television programming.

Ironically, the better the narrative, the LESS likely a viewer wants to interact with it. The WORSE the narrative, the more producers MUST get the audience engaged by means OUTSIDE the actual creative material.

"Interactive" and "Television" are oxymorons suited perfectly for morons.

I'm really surprised there wasn't any more Compaq products mentioned! :-) Oh... and how about IBMs OS from the early 90's... now what was that OS? Remember the one that was going to replace Microsoft and Apple's OS's? Oh well... some old timers will remember!

One thing I was surprised at was the bash on the original Mac Portable... or Mac Lugable! I actually had one for work! I took it home once and on the airplane once. Back then I was like the "look at me" sort of guy on the plane! Everyone wanted to look at my laptop! Now a days, everyone has one on the plane. Anyway... even though it was too big, and lasted about 45 mins on a full charge, and could barely sit on your lap... all while sporting a Mortarola 6800 processor with a blinding 12mhz processor speed and 256kb of RAM (ah, newbies... noticed I said 256 KB - not MB!). Yeah... that was hot stuff back then! What other choices did you have? 6-8lb DOS laptops with no hard drives. Or a suitcase like thing from Compaq or IBM that had to be plugged in. Yeah... big and bulky... but the Mac Lugable paved the way for the Powerbook... some the best laptops ever made!

Oh... one last comment about the other poster who mentions that QuickTime should be on the list! You should turn in your PC now and step away from the keyboard. You might have a virus that is making you dilusional!

Well... that's my 2 cents! Enjoy!

Darn It! you forgot KaZaa free music download, which clearly states in the form that it WILL put spyware on your computer if you say Yes, even though the website says NOW WITH NO SPYWARE!

I was a victim to 7 of these disasters...
not to mention many other "cool" items not mentioned that I deeply regretted buying/downloading.
Some call me "cutting edge," but some simply call me "fool." LOL

PCjr was a flop? What about the IBM Convertable? We're talkin' about the worlds heaviest, biggest and useless laptop. They made 500 of these beauties and quit!!

I can't believe Avaratec's whole line of would be computers did not make the list. Their computers are so bad theye remind me of the self destructing tape on Mission Impossible. I have had two of their units for thirteen months and have spent six of those months trading broken computers with their tech support. That is when they answer the phone.

TRS 80: No further explenation required

As a programmer my favorite hunk-a-junk was Win32S which was meant to introduce you to the wonderful world of 32 bit windows applications while sitting atop a 16 bit oriented Windows 3.1

The crash and burn cycle was quite awesome.

I can't believe Avaratec's whole line of would be computers did not make the list. Their computers are so bad theye remind me of the self destructing tape on Mission Impossible. I have had two of their units for thirteen months and have spent six of those months trading broken computers with their tech support. That is when they answer the phone.

You forgot the tape drives.

Slow back up, slow restore, expensive tapes and the most incompatibility ever

I was surprised to find the Packard Bell line of PC's missing. I was an engineering student during their heyday, and me and my fellow students studied their machines as examples of how not to design a circuit board...

WinTV Pro. any Haupauge software. PeoplePC uses all your system grab the phone numbers and connect with the connection wizard. PPC uses 100% of the processor and no less than 200meg of Ram. This stops it, and also helps with disconnects from the internet.

The ZIP drive was great. I used and supported them for years without a single click of death.

What's missing?
Norton antivirus
Netscape4
Lotus 123v3
Microsoft Passport
Wordperfect 6 for DOS

What bout Bonzi buddy, anyone remeber him 'nuff said

You forgot: Any software from 180 Solutions, Hotbar, Hotmail (which Microsoft now owns, and in which they ignore spam filters if it involves mail from them or a paid affiliate), Google Desktop (Anyone who complains about the NSA wiretaps and then uses Google Desktop needs clubbed to death like a baby sea - why is it that it is horrible if the government does it, but when Google does it we hardly hear a peep?), AOL's Goodmail, The DMCA, MySpace.com, Bonzi Buddy, etc., any computer made by Tandy, Norton/Symantec Firewall and Antivirus (versions past 2002 are atrocious and do worse things to your computer than most viruses), Everquest and WoW - for creating a legion of addicts who should be doing something other than sitting at a computer all day and night, and last but not least: Microsft Windows -for without you we might never had known what a Trojan Horse, a BSOD or a Keylogger was.

Kodak photo CD. You pay extra when you get your photos developed and Kodak sent you a CD with all your family photos burned on it. Did I mention you needed to buy an expensive player and you could only view them on your TV.

Hard to argue with AOL at #1, but Windows ME has got be #2, maybe 1A...

It's depressing how many of these companies/products I've had the misfortune to deal with. I could not agree with this list more. AOL definitely deserves the top slot. Congratulations to them. Now I just wish they'd go out of business.

Yeah. Bonzi Buddy! He was so fun to play around with until he started crashing Explorer. Everything was fine after I uninstalled him.

I never had any problems with AOL. The only thing that was odd was they sent a letter to me saying they were no longer offering Broadband/DSL when we had it, so we switched over to SBC DSL, but I still here AOL offering Broadband/DSL to this day. What the heck? Oh well. I'm glad we switched.

I purchased a Phillips CD-i in the early 90's to help with college. All it ended up doing was eating up over half of my student loan and not giving me enough resources for any essay I had to write. Hocked it fo $40 2 years later.

Under dishonorable mentions, you mention the Timex Data Link watch. This was one of the greatest advancements in high school and college cheating ever created. Teachers will always check to see if you have crib notes, if you hid formulas on the back of the label of your water bottle, and even force you to clear your calculator's memory, but unless the teacher is truly savvy, they're not going to make anyone take off their watch -- or think twice if they look at it multiple times during a test.

How could you leave out Word Perfect for Windows? Starting in about 1983, WP built up a large base of WP-DOS users. Free telephone help was available to everyone. By the early 90's, millions of people knew the meaning of Shift-F7 and a whole bunch more keyboard commands. Then Windows came out. First, WP did nothing. When WP finally came out with a Windows-compatible product, they inexplicably left out any option to use the familiar, fast, keyboard commands! People who knew the commands, and who could keyboard, were cruelly abandoned -- forced to move a hand off the keyboard, to a mouse, to connect to a software that was unpredictable, unintuitive, and difficult to control. Lets see, how do I number a paragraph the way I want it to and not the way the software thinks my document should look? Not with WP Windows, and sadly not with Microsoft Word either, which is also hell-bent on making your documents look just like MS thinks you want it to look. Oh well, there is a solution. My Windows 98 machine still runs WP 5.1 for DOS, which lets me turn out documents the way I want them, fast.

Yeah, got the Timex watch (I liked it until I got an LCD), got the CueCat (it NEVER picked up the UPC's correctly), and avoided ME.

What you're missing: the iCube, IE5.2/Mac, and Memory Stick.

Don't forget Netscape 6 .. the product that pushed IE into the monopoly position it holds today

Another classic is the 1995 Intel Pentium floating point unit flaw that they were in denial. That is until the lawyers showed up.

How about the cold heat soldering iron.

i never had a problem with Windows ME. I still use it on one computer at home. the thing with some of these problems had a good resolution - a check from the company and the end of suit. I'm sure some of these "mistakes" made some people a lot of money. I got in on the softram settlement. Epson is coming through with some cash soon. sony sent money some years back on a cd settlement.

Awesome! Anyone who razzes AOL is cool by me. How the HECK do they stay in buisness?!!!!!

Great list. Cool cat, bonzi buddy, etc... But I still have real player on my system and there are still websites that amazingly only stream clips in .ram or .rm. And real player still pops up with some problem. Can't connect to the network... It always sounded terrible anyway. How do they stay in business? Good choice for no.1. "For people who don't know any better". Good line.
JT

I would have added Netscape browser version 6.0 to the list. That browser had problems all around, after it, Netscape really cleaned up their act and made some better versions, version 7.1 was the last I tried. I was a Netscape browser fan, now I'm using Mozilla Firefox. Anyhow, just thought I'd mention Netscape 6.0.

Sega CD add on
Sega 32x
Atari Lynx and Jaguar
Virtual Gameboy

Others have mentioned Netscape 4 and 6, but what about Netscape 2 ? If uae, gpf and bsod were file extensions, this thing would have registered them. I could actually make it crash on demand by carrying out a particular sequence of actions. (Unfortunately (?) I can't remember now what that sequence was.)

Mind you, it caused me to buy RamDoubler for Windows, which unlike the similarly named scam products actually worked. (No, in spite of the name it didn't even claim to double the RAM, but its management of system resource heaps meant you could open about twice the programs. I compared with and without.)

How about a special sub-list for installers? Adobe for no.1, Chilli iBurst (an Australian wireless ISP) for no.2.

You guys are just too young! Lookup the eight-track player.

I might have placed IE or Windows ME as #1 but I guess AOL earned top (dis)honors. Very funny article given enough time has passed since my "click of death" experiences and IOMEGA's "What, Me Worry"? attitude.

Upon reflection, they would have been smarter to show a little more concern.

has anyone noticed aol is like bizarro spyware?

acrobat needs to be there

The Sparq drive! Right around the time of the zip drive's popularity comes the Sparq- featuring removeable hard drive cartridges that were way cheaper per gigabyte than anything on the market...except that the cartridges had about a 1 month life. I bought this thing, the disks started breaking, the company went bankrupt asap. Went online to investigate how to maybe fix it...there were thousands of complaints. I think this thing was a pc-world "best product" too!

DaiKatana *snigger*

What about the first version of Roxio easy CD and DVD creator. Their CD creating software was always pretty good, but when I got my first DVD burner Roxio came bundled. It would not even write data to DVD. Many coasters. Now I usse Deep Burner(free) for data and Sly Soft for movies. Both are great

Im not sure if this applies to this list but a good one would be all software made by dell, dell bios, dell media players, cant raze the lcd monitors though.
Did any one but me buy a ps2 hdd, $130 one game.

Apple's PowerCD.
This was out in the early 1990s for approximately the blink of an eye. It was the worst Apple product ever: a supposedly "portable" CD player that was unable to play anything when removed from its chunky grey base station, because the base station was its only power source. Oops!

This list covers a very short section of all time. My nominee in the all-time category would be the Heathkit Parasol -- the very first Heathkit. Not a computer, not a radio, not a parasol -- an airplane!

I believe it was Panasonic that made a personal check printer that was about $!50.00 that was a real stinko.

About AOL. You guys forgot to mention the ability for AOL to "fix" you computer. This "fixing" has caused many problems and I have had to personally deal with many blue screens of death because of AOL's pc "fixing" ability.

I used to do support for one of the big isp's.
Bonzi buddy was one to remember. I used a computer once with it on there. It kept popping up and obscuring things you needed to see. I had to uninstall it from many, many peoples systems. That was one of the first big spywares

This story should be added to the list.
Or better yet, added to the list of 25 ALL TIME POINTLESS PIECES OF JOURNALISM.

How many people did AOL introduce the world of the internet? Much more then PCworld.com, the software has its issues but I guarentee millions of people would not be online now if it wasnt for AOL.

HP print manager software.

It adds hundreds of registry items, adds half a dozen programs to the startup, tries to supervise just about every activity on your computer, and slows printing by orders of magnitude?

Rip it all out and just keep the driver.

The Audrey supports broadband. Most of them came with a USB ethernet adapter.

Excelllent article, I have to admit I chunkled through your entire "walk down memory lane." Thanks for bringing back the memories.

My list would definitly include Adobe Acrobat. Each version becomes more and more bloated- with no major advance in a decade. Far from being a universal format, not even different versions of acrobat pdf's are compatible. And how come I still have acrobat 5 and 6 on my computer, i thought I upgraded to 7- try removing an old version after upgrading. you would think the upgrade would be cleaner after all these years.

I would put Creative Lab's Soundblaster drivers up there too. Their old hardware for DOS was great. The Pro, the 16, and the AWE32. Setting jumpers was a pain, but it was better than their windows drivers. They're another company that decided to transform your PC into a Creative Labs media PC when all you wanted was the damn driver.

And up until recently, you needed the original CD to install fresh drivers without using some hack. Pitch the CD that came with the card thinking you'll just download them when when you need them, rebuild your box a year later, and sorry - no downloadable drivers for you unless you have the CD for proof. Proof of what? It's hardware. WTF were they thinking?

Love the fact that A O H-E-Double Hockey Sticks was Numero Uno on the list! Between the constant hangups at peak hours, the countless bugs, the "fixes" as one other person mentioned. My distain for that company and there "service" still lives with me today! I now have At&t Yahoo, which I've had for a good half year. FREE AT LAST!!!!

Say what you will about Priceline. Once I set it up to buy groceries I could go to the supermarket, load up on fillet mignon and pay ridiculous prices for it. I miss it very very much

Two things: First the Pippin never made it to market as an Apple product. By the time it was sold to anyone it was branded as a Bandai product.

Second, the 20th Anniversary Mac came out in 1996, not 1997, and had nothing to do with Steve Jobs.

Lovely. How cathartic.

Two additions:

[1] Personics Headmouse -- fine for disabled folks, but head/neck-injury-inductive for the rest of us. I remember when they were running ads every month in Byte, blowing thru investor cash

[2] FEAD Optimizer -- the brilliant Adobe Acrobat installation compression tool that serves absolutely no discernable purpose other than eating up time

-- stan

Seeing the Timex Datalink watch on the Dishonorable mention list just showed that none of the authors actually had one! What other watch could interface with Outlook to download your contact info? What other watch had so many easily programmable alarms? Ok, the screen-programming thing was weird, but there wasn't another way to do it back then :) Of course Windows XP killed it by denying direct access to the video hardware it needed.

The new version of the watch has USB. Cool.

How about the "Perfect" suite of software that came bundled with Kaypro computers in the early 1980s? That was really the worst pile of crap I've ever seen. I was in an office where regularly throughout the day I'd hear a cry of "Oh NO!!!" as Perfectthisorthat would destroy another piece of work.

HP tape drives -- everyone I've ever had has died an early and unnatural death.

How about that piece of crap TCP/IP package for Win 3.1... blessedly I can't recall the name of it. I think it had a gecko motif...

Bluetooth... a technology invented to link nearby devices in an office cube, a use that never really developed, and which has become popular for cell phones, but is not quite ready for prime time...

How about the way that printers still can't feed paper reliably? And handle envelopes like they were squirming cats?

Unlimited-use Internet accouts, one of the most massive frauds in technical history?

All of these things and no one mentioned WebSense?
Block the critics of their products and their competition? Blocks sites based on stupid creiterria?
C'Mon.....
~Crispy~

Almost forgot..... Earthlink, the company that single-handedly destroyed Mindspring....
Then made up for it by moving it's support staff to Bangalore....
Way to go guys......
~Crispy~

if this article would be written a few years lates i am sure 100$ Laptop would be listed too

The worse piece of software I ever worked with was Windows version 1. It had yellow screens and never allowed anything to run for more than 10 minutes, including itself! It came on 286 machines. It was removed from the machines with in a week.

pcworld magazine should be on the list too for its heavily biased reviews, 2 to 1 advertisement to content ratio and generally poor writing and editing.

I'm glad Internet Explorer is high up on the list, and it could stand being a bit higher. While it is the veritable definition of "security hole" perhaps of equal importance is the incredibly poorly designed user interface.

Why would anyone want to open a clone of the window they were already viewing (especially for those still using dial-up) when creating a new window? Why did it take Opera and Firefox, et al. to start eating their lunch before Microsoft took notice?

Methinks theres some brain-deadedness here ...

I'd also nominate Cheyenne Software's "Infinite Disk" archival software for, at the very least, an honorable mention.

The concept was (and still is) great - a file manager that archives infrequently used files to a variety of media for offline storage. In practice - not so great (at least, circa 1997) ... after having moved several megabytes of files to tape as a test I found it impossible to bring them back. Kind of a black mark for archival software!

Played with it for several days in several ways (to ZIP, to floppy - no go), and, after suffering through equally horrible tech support, gave up, and encased the install disks in amber lest future generations be denied a glimpse at atrocious software.

Gosh. Quite a few comments and not a single mention of the single most dangerous PC product ever: Outlook Express.

I really liked this article. I have to say i had so many problems with America Online. One of them which was mentioned here was their cancellation policy. they charged my card for almost a year. I usually dont check my credit card bills, because i trust everyone. I called them and complained after i found out and they werent any help. making the story short they said it is your fault to check for your billing materials and I didnt have any luck with them.
anyway i totally agree. they are the worth of all. dont sign up with them at all. I know i dont

And for an example of things that went "clunk": DOS 4.0 I know of grown men who would swear on a (large) stack of bibles that they never heard of such a thing. They all worked -- on some other project (sure, dude) -- in Redmond.

IBM's PC-1 should have been mentioned. It came with no serial port, a modem that could not be upgraded, a PC-Junior sound card that was compatible with nothing, no ISA slots, and non-replaceable hard drive and monitor. This piece of junk got most of its sales from IBM's own employees who wouldn't be tricked into buying their own company's computer again.

OMIGOD!!! You are to be commended for including my 2 favorite stinkers (Quicktime and any Real product) but, how could such an august collection be without the wonderful PS/2 architecture that required ancillary board manufacturers to pay a royalty to IBM for the privilege of using the bus architecture? Of course, they quickly recovered by obscuring our recollection of that stupendous flop by championing the heavily flawed OS/2 Warp (all versions)! But, those were kept company by other famous bombs like Novell's server crashing V 4.0, Intel's wonderfully crippled 386SX chips, IBM's JAD (Joint Application Development ) which produced great programs like... Uh well, give me a few decades to think of one... Then there was the mighty successful Microsoft Windows For Workgroups that absolutely nobody ever got working correctly! Ah, I could go on but, I need study the effects of manipulating data in expanded memory using the LIM boards I bought.

I've had my Timex DataLink for over ten years and it's still working great! I just had the battery replaced a couple of weeks ago that had lasted at least 5 years and used my CRT monitor to refresh all the data. It works fine with WinXP. I'm sure it will last another ten years. Best watch I've ever owned and will pass it on to my heirs!

The product that deserves number 1 is windows "xp".

Yes, your favorite apps run on it (because they have to). I'm not saying those suck. I'm saying "xp", as on operating system sucks.

As an OS (not a way to run your apps, your apps could run on these if their makers had the decency to make it happen), compared to other OSes I've tried and recommend to people, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Debian, Mac OS X, Solaris . . windows is the worst, ever, period.

$ 200 or more a copy for "pro"? The free ones (which are actually free as in liberty but here I use "free" also meaning price-zero) are far better as operating systems.

People already reading this article don't need to be told why windows sucks. (If you think to yourself "but I can't run my favorite program on GNU+Linux you are too stupid to understand my comment, go f*** yourself.)

MICROSOFT WIRELESS OPTICAL MOUSE BLUE. Yet more evidence that MS is totally incompetent on any piece of hardware more complex than a mousepad, millions of folks bought this wonder and then wondered why they did it. For the more enterprising, a couple of Web pages appeared explaining how to open the mouse and adjust a trim cap on the circuit board to get the damned thing to work--apparently something that QC at the factory couldn't figure out. I got mine to work that way--until it gave up the ghost permanently after 9 months. The Wireless Optical Mouse Blue also ate batteries and couldn't use rechargeables, and had the thrillingly dangerous habit of dying without any warning whatsoever--a mouse for those who like to live on the ragged edge. I never checked to see if any class action lawsuits came about. I probably should have.

Totally agree with the Iomega Zip Drive.
I use it now as a paperweight.

What about the barbie pc and hotwheels pc,after they missed there christmas deadline, they were then fined by the goverment and shout down which left all of us owners with the pc with no more tech support or parts. and the goverment kept the money.

You left out the BIGGEST LOSER of all - Microsoft (anything they make). MS has the biggest group of Beta Testers in existence - their customer base. Buggy software with security holes big enough to drive an eighteen wheeler through.

Long Live TUX!

That was a great article! I'm glad i'm not the only one that had to suffer with AOL.
And i agree with your list they are the worst!
And i have about a million free hours worth of CD's think they would honor them "snicker"?

LOP and brain-dead zealots. Those are to be put in the list. Along with QuickTime crap.

1999 Compaq- I perfectly lost it all to a 2000 doallr so called gamer/net pc called the presario 5600i. Then they went bankrupt and dishonored the "extra" warranty I paid for. After 31 days (yes, 1 day over thier return policy) attempting a lemoned pc refund got refused as well.And of course it had the iomega zip drive, and the predecossor to the ibm deskstar (just as unreliable).Can't forget the the slew of "winmodems" either for that generation aiding the mystery spam phone calls....Regardless of recovery of some of these brands, I have labeled them forever.I know where you went Compaq. You can run, but can't hide...

I don't the the Mac Portable deserves to be on the list. The artilce is wrong in saying it couldn't run on AC power. It came with a power supply for such use (and charging the battery). Yes it was heavy, but they didn't call it a laptop. The large battery gave excellent runtime. It was thoughtful of Apple to allow placing the trackball on either side of the keyboard. The use of CMOS static memory allowed a sleep mode with essentially zero power consumption, and instant wake-up. While the machine was expensive and heavy, it was the first portable running Mac OS. It was reliable and worked very well. Considering that one knew the size and weight when buying it, I think it is unfair to derate a machine that delivered on what was advertised. The machine provided a welcome alternative to DOS/Windows. The machine is now very valuable to collectors, something that can't be said of any of the DOS/Windows machines of the era. Those all quickly became regarded as junk. Old machines from Packard Bell or some of Apple's Performas were far more deserving of criticism. The Macintosh Portable was a very exciting thing to own and use.

So many people posting, so many people forgetting to mention Gator.

Who chose these products? A group of recent college grads? Apparently, nothing bad in "hi-tech" was made prior to 1984, and most of it came out in the past 10 years, i.e. stuff that a 21 year old would be able to remember (in between bong hits perhaps).

I would expect a "hi-tech" list to include lots of gadgets. Half of these items are either software, services, or concepts, not "products" in the sense that the geniuses who came up with this list want to convey.

I hope in the future these kids will occupy themselves with the latest music download service and leave the analysis to actual experts with a concept of time that extends past 20 years.

I am truly more stupid for having wasted 5 minutes of my life reading this sycophantic tripe.

CNet should clearly be at the top of the list for so blatently being Microsoft bought hacks.

What about Nintendo's Dial-Up and Broadband Adapters for the Nintendo GameCube? Membership was supposedly $9.99 a month and there were maybe two or three games that could go online. If you logged on, the chances of finding anyone else were probably very, very slim (unless you called your friend to come on). $9.99 a month for a small library of online games was a bad mistake for Nintendo.

Also, there's the WeatherBug. Had good weather forcasts, but come with a ton of ads and startup could be slow at times. It took some time to uninstall, but everything was normal after that.

Oh, remember WidTangent (now WildGames). My computer kept identifying it as spyware, and there were constant pop-ups, some were for thier games, others were not. Usually games cost $19.99 for an activation code that would unlock the full version on your computer. This would be good until 1-6 months later when the game would ask for the code again. Log in names, High Scores, and Unlockable content won in the game were deleted or reset numerous times. Thank God for Club Pogo and RealArcade.

The worst I ran into, which came with my computer, is WordPerfect 10. No matter what you do, first you have to save the document, then go to my documents to print it. It will not print from the program. And it doesn't matter what printer you have. It came with Windows XP. I bought my HP computer in 2004.

nVidia Dustbusters and Matrox Parhelias were pretty disappointing.

I'm still using my Timex datalink. When I found it was not "dead" but just could not communicate with the phospors used in newer monitors. I used an old one for programming. This made it somewhat less useful. To date no one seems to have the datalink's unique ability to access the phone list and find a phone number quickly by scanning. It's too bad microsoft and timex divorced as the product was and still is a great idea that needs some more updating for the new display devices. Those of you who still have one will be happy to find it still works fine- with an older monitor for data entry.

Real Networks. They really abandoned their users after sold themselves to AOL. What a surprise. RealNetworks was horrible to begin with and now AOL really did a wonderful job of that miserable software being the worst ever. Real One player completely changed the way it plays music from real8 that music sites that had real player formats(rm and ra ) had no choice but to offer older versions of Real player. RealOne now acts like a browser and would like to control everything you do on your computer.

AOL = Newbie...my friend works at AOL marketing and tries to convince me (an IT consultant) that AOL is the greatest. I feel so vindicated.

Great list and beautifully written. Of course, everyone will have their bunch of losers:

Top of my list was the kyocera palm-phone (bad palm, worse phone).

The Commodore 1541 disk drive.
Whack, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit. Whack, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit. That's old school bad technology.

US-CERT actually did NOT ever recommend people stop using Internet Explorer, as your article inaccurately suggests. They stated that not using IE was one possible workaround to avoid IE vulns. They never said that switching to another browser would make you more secure. US-CERT knows that the only way to entirely avoid IE vulns is to stop using Windows, not to stop using IE.

The IE vulnerability I believe you're talking about from 2004 was the download.ject "Iframe" vuln. This vuln was found by the mangleme HTML fuzzing tool. The author of that tool stated that IE was far far more secure from such attacks than any other browser, including the brand new Firefox, due to Microsoft's superior code testing back in 1999 to 2001 against fuzzing.

The problem with IE, besides that it is popular, is that it is old. It has about as many security problems in the default config as RedHat Linux 7.x from the same time period did.

Absolutely, IE 6 has security problems that are being addressed, albeit slowly. XP SP2 helped quite a bit there.

The Apple puck mouse - here's a hint for those of you with the non-indented mouse button who have a hard time finding the mouse button. Look for the mouse cord, click the button. MORONS! How do you tell the difference between the left and right buttons on a traditional mouse? And it's a good thing the scroll wheel is between the buttons, or you idiots might be looking for it at the ass end of the mouse! BEWARE OF STUPID PEOPLE IN LARGE GROUPS!

What about Creative's Digital VCR??? Never worked right from day one. Creative won't support it, even though its only a few years old.
You can't find any info about it on Creative's site. Its like it never existed. Shame on you Creative!

Also, I received a bill from AOL for services. I have NEVER used AOL. Shame on you too!

Early versions of CD Creator were horrible. You had a 50% chance of actually creating a CD that worked. The other 50% went straight into the trash.

What about Creative's Digital VCR??? Never worked right from day one. Creative won't support it, even though its only a few years old.
You can't find any info about it on Creative's site. Its like it never existed. Shame on you Creative!

Also, I received a bill from AOL for services. I have NEVER used AOL. Shame on you too!

Early versions of CD Creator were horrible. You had a 50% chance of actually creating a CD that worked. The other 50% went straight into the trash.

How did Circus City's divx scam not make the top 10?

The Big 3 at one time was AOL, Compuserve and Progigy for access to the Internet. I also remember my very first $$$ bill. For 4,822 minutes I got a bill for $270.00/mo.

As competition began to evolve today's rates (i.e. $19.95 & $9.95) for monthly service, I made a vow that AOL would NEVER gain me as a customer.

For as they too went to service plans for unlimited access for pennys a day, I said to myself "you jerks could have charged me that all along but chose to take advantage of the situation".

The "34 million customers" as you point out in "the 25 worst", is a simple case study on the vast numbers of the misinformed.

It is the "misinformed" that keep Exxon/Mobil in business and rolling Multi-Billion dollar profits into their pockets on a quarterly basis.

If someone or entity would use the "carpet-bombing technique" to inform Americans, maybe we could drive down the price of gasoline. We essentially move like feed animals while corporate america laughs all the way to the bank.

For all you fellow feed animals out there, that like to make us all feel helpless with your petty arguments, your natural indifference and typical negative comments - remember this........

In 2006, The Saudi Arabian population is paying $0.61 cents per gallon of gasoline.
So THANKS ! You just don't make the connect do you.

Exxon, AOL and ALLSTATE Insurance will never get a red cent from me. I enjoy being amused by the Millions they spend on advertizing.

Are You In Good Hands ? Ha !

Sorry, Ramon. You must be on a different McLeod from me. (Hyuk hyuk....)

But (and this is a big butt) I'll agree with you on this one....

#16 Comet Cursor. I'll agree with you on that one!! Shake!! In fact, I'll hold the guy who came up with this and you hit him with a frying pan!!

Now.....

I'm not a big fan of slamming people who have taken a chance and done something. What products have YOU brought to market?

Let's start with #1 - AOL. It was my first ISAP and I had no complaints from 1997 when I first signed. The interface was intuitive -- even now looking back, it was still easier than the latest verision of IE. Their problem is they priced themselved out of the market and when DSL came along at $15/mon, they were obsolete. I switched because I needed a POP3 account, and also because they started using tech support in India.

#2 - Real Player. This was the first audio program that I learned about which introduced webcasting to me. It was the standard then (1997) and, like AOL, it was easy to use and never failed. Again, today, it is still easier to use than Media Player.

#6 - The Lion King. I don't understand this one. It's a movie. In that case, you should add every other movie that is produced.

#15 - IOmega Zip Drive. Hello? You didn't like a 250MB floppy disk? When it came out the standard was a 1.44MB floppy disk. Now we had a floppy-style disk that would hold TONS of data! It's still much better than fragile CDs for repeated data tranfers. No, it won't hold 700MB like a CD, but for most office applications, that's what I used until the USB flash drives came out.

Now, this one I've got to see!!!!

#24 DigiScents iSmell. LOL!!!!

AOL #1? Your credibility is dropping fast, PC World. If it weren't for AOL, the interest in the internet would have been slowed significantly. Look at it's competition when it first hit...Prodigy and Compuserve...not exactly user friendly to new users.

Your reasonings behind putting it #1 are weak. A mass marketing campaign? If that's the reason, then you've got issues. Realplayer/spyer is the worst of the worst. AOL brought people to the internet....and was responsible for who knows how much worldwide economics.

My Timex Datalink still works fine.
I actually like the flashy bars. The new models use boring USB to connect.
What other watch allowed you to upload add on code?!

It is kind of a brick though and the microsoft logo is somewhat annoying.

Hidee to awl muh frens over at a.a!!

It'd be fitting to see Bob running on a PC Jr.

But you guys are WAY too young! Anyone want to buy a copy of JRT Pascal?

MS-DOS 4.0?

Top View?

...my list would run to many pages, but then it would span almost 30 years of personal computing...

Perhaps the worst tech product of all time and covering the span of many years is Microsoft's Windows operating system. It is amazing that a company can produce such an unreliable product and made billions. The product has cost businesses and individuals so much time and money that it would be hard to count. Your description of AOL, "AOL succeeded initially by targeting newbies, using brute-force marketing techniques" would fit this product. The current Apple advertising with the PC freezing up with Windows is right on target. There is definately a business opportunity here for a reliable operating system because Microsoft will never develop one.

Um WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER 10 anyone????

AOL as #1 is highly appropriate. Back in the late 80's I used to tell my customers to stay away from Dbase IV. I told them I would never touch it. I got screamed at frequently. I feel better already.

Windows ME shouldn't be at this list!!
I've used it for a few years and it was the best OS after Windows XP... I've already used Windows 95, 98, 2000 too...

And the worst was Windows 2000! It was always crashing, bugged! Windows ME was the most stable version of Windows after Windows XP...

The Timex DataLink should definetly NOT be on the Dishonorable list! It's the best watch I ever had! It was fantastic!

I totaly agree with the other users/fans of this watch. It doesn't belong on the list.

What about sony's minidisk idea?
or ANY proprietary-means-totally-incompatible-with-everything hardware?

Did I mention Sun Microsystem's Solaris?

E-Machine themselves should have received at LEAST an (dis)honorable mention in the article. As their systems, while 'Reasonably' powerful and certainly innexpensive, ended as a total bust for most users. That low price was only RENTAL, not ownership. The user could not upgrade or even change many of the system settings. No adding larger or more drives, no improving the sound or video cards, NOTHING. Any attempt made would lock down the system with access denied. Even SELLING the system to someone else was technically not an option, as the user never actually owned it from the start.

I have to admit I was a big time dBASE user and dBASE IV (number 10) was the product that got me to switch to FoxPro. The same programs ran 6 times as fast in FoxPro.

AOL and their so-called help (after they "fix" whatever it was kicked you off the internet AGAIN, you have to put all the settings back to where they were.)
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Dell's customer service should make it in there, for refusing to tell the customer how a product will ship, refusing to sell ink cartridges etc in stores, & making things just plain difficult.

finally a minidisk mention how long did those last like 10 minutes.

and i dont think there is any mention of Speak and Spell... the most annoying toy ever!

COOL ARTICLE... Keep ROCKING.. PC WORLD rules !!

What about Sony's ATRAC Portable CD Player? Sure you can fit 200-350+ tracks on a normal CD-R, but try skipping them one by one for the song you wanted to hear. Also, the ATRAC CD you made can only be played by certain Sony Products.

And what about eMusic? Sure 40 downloads (transferable and burnable) for $9.99 seems like a good deal, but there are no big name artists, just independent lables. The Big main artists are Johnny Cash, Dane Cook (Comedian), and Ron White (Comedian). The rest are pretty much unknown or the known artists have very few songs available.

That was a hoot! Thanx for the memories, and the therapy.

I would like to add PC World to that list.
-Pages covered in ads
-Spyware cookies
-Dubious testing
-Old stories re-hashed

Come on now, let us not forget those cool metal cd cases AOL used to send us free in the mail. The CD's were sailed into the yard and I still have 5 of those cases for putting small computer parts in.

i saw the Apple Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (1997) in a seinfeld rerun it was on his desk.

Thank you SO much for doing this article! Who cares whether you got the "RIGHT" 25? Point taken, and I LOVE it! Finally, a tech article that isn't a lame pseudo-advertisement for some new gadget or software package, but rather true journalism that is reflective, informative, interesting, fun and pretty much TRUE!

If you're going to put the Zip drive on the list, then you should at least give a nod to the Datasonix Pereos tape drive, a backup unit 1994 running on AA batteries and using tapes the size of a postage stamp.

I had an opportunity to evaluate a pre-release unit and could not believe the hype that followed in the press, various publications slavishly quoting hugely inflated claims without verifying them.

Everyone's whining about not listing "this product" or "that" in this particular Hall of Shame is even more shameful. That is SO not what to take away from the experience of reading articles like this. This type of behaviour cracks me up every time I read commentary on a "Top [n] List of [Something]"!

People's whining about not listing "this product" or "that" in this particular Hall of Shame is even more shameful. "I can't BELIEVE you didn't include such-and-such - you OBVIOUSLY missed the boat by not doing so!". That is so not what to take away from the experience of reading articles like this. This sort of silliness cracks me up every time I read commentary on a "Top [n] List of [Something]" type article! Of course, people who politely suggest additional selections based on their perspective are to be appreciated for adding a sort of "reader's epilogue".

The IBM "Deathstar" was on the list, but what about the Quantum Bigfoot drive? Compaq put it in their Presario and even many of their corporate desktops in the mid-late 90's. Huge (5 1/4" footprint), weighed a ton, and virtually sure to crash within a month or sooner. At one company I worked for we just automatically replaced them with 3 1/2" sized harddrives as soon as the PC's came in. I just found one in a dead PC buried in a closet the other day and use it as a paperweight!

I second the imperative to include Quicktime, within the Top 5 at least. Whenever I'm forced to use this shitty piece of software with its unbelievably ugly interface and its stupidly restricted functionality (no full screen mode in the free version?? Pulease!!!) I feel reassured about my decision not to enter the Apple universe. Coolness notwithstanding - whoever comes up with something like this must be mentally AS WELL AS ethically challenged.

AOL IS A WORST SCAM ARTIST. AOL TRICKED YOU INTO USING THEIR SERVICE AND REFUSED TO REFUND FOR NON USAGE.

JUSTICE DEPT. AND FCC SHOULD INVESTIGATE THEIR BUSINESS PRATICE AND PUNISH AOL FOR WHAT THEY HAVE DONE TO CONSUMERS.

AOL JUNKS FILLING UP ALL NEW COMPUTERS AND HARD TO GET RID OF WITHOUT APPROVAL.

AOL INTERNET SERVICE IS NONE AND TOO SLOW. THEY BLAME ON SERVICE PROVIDER FOR PROBLEMS.

I WAS NEW TO COMPUTER AND WOULD NEVER TOUCH AOL AS LONG AS I LIVED.

AOL SIMPLY THE "WORST PRODUCT OF CENTURY"

AOL SIMPLY THE "WORST PRODUCT OF CENTURY". SONY AND AOL SHOULD MERGE TOGETHER. THEY ARE THE BEST PARTNERS OF ALL TIME.

I LOVE PCWORLD FOR THEIR UNBIASED REVIEWS AND COMMENTS.

WILL RENEW FOR ANOTHER 2 YEARS. KEEPING UP GOOD WORK. CONSUMERS COUNT ON YOU TO BUY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES.

DON'T LET THESE SCUMBAGS LIKE AOL & SONY DESTROY YOUR REPUTATIONS OR INFLUENT YOUR CANDID REVIEWS.

YOU ARE THE FIRST ONE WITH "THE WORST 25 PRODUCTS OF THE YEAR." GREAT IDEA..

Yes good Job AOL aka AOHell deserves the number one spot though they made a hell of a lot of money. My least favorite experience before I dropped them was dealing with their customer support yes I know that is a misnomer. One time I called them up and they had their flunkie go down his prepared troubleshooting list and came to the same conclusion as always the problem was my computer and not them. So I went to use a different computer, got the same problem called them and got the same flunkie lol Berated him severly and dropped their service.

Um hey by putting in my email address you are not going to bombard me with spam and or try to send some viruses my way, you know this is the net and I trust no one!!!!! lol

How could you forget the IBM's OS/2, which was supposed to take over the world, or IBM TopView which was IBM's first attempt at a window based operating system, which was dropped a few months later when MicroSoft released Windows 1.0?

AOL FILLED UP OUR LAND WITH THEIR USELESS CDs, OUR COMPUTERS WITH THEIR JUNKS, AND CREATED MORE PROBLEMS THAN FIXING A COMPUTERS.

NOW AOL INTRODUCES ANTI VIRUS & PARENTAL CONTROL WHILE AOL EMPLOYEES SOLD CUSTOMER RECORDS TO A HIGHEST BIDDERS.

AOL SELLING BROADBAND SERVICES WHICH THEY DON'T HAVE OR OWN. IT IS BETTER OFF CUSTOMERS TO BUY INTERNET SERVICES FROM LOCAL VENDOR WITH MUCH BETTER SUPPORTS.

AOL HAS NOTHING TO OFFER TO ITS CUSTOMERS. BE CAREFUL WITH AOL MARKETING HYPE, CHECK THEM OUT BEFORE YOU GIVE YOUR CREDIT CARD TO AOL. YOU HAVE NOTHING BUT PROBLEM & HASSLE.

DON'T LET AOL FOOLS YOU WITH FREE TRIAL. IT IS ANOTHER SCAM TO LURE YOU IN. CANCEL AOL SERIVICE WILL TAKE SEVERAL WAITING PHONE CALLS. WORST OF ALL, AOL DELAYS AS MUCH AS THEY CAN SO YOU CANNOT CANCEL SERVICE.

EVERYTHING AOL OFFERS IS WIDELY AVAILABLE AT GOOGLE, MSN, AND YAHOO FOR FREE.

SOON AOL WILL CLOSE ITS DOOR VERY SOON. YOU DON'T WANT TO HAVE ACCOUNT WITH THEM. SIGN UP FREE SERVICES FROM RESPECTABLE AND HONEST COMPANIES.

AOL CLEARLY EARN THE "WORST PRODUCT" OF ALL AND PCWORLD HAS A GUTS TO SPEAK UP FOR ITS CUSTOMERS.

For what it's worth, one of the pictures of the "IBM GXP75" hard drive is actually a Maxtor drive. Actually, I think both pictures are wrong.

I think PC World should be top of that list - need I say more ?

One that should have made the top 2 is Panda Software Virus protection. Nothing like letting spyware and viruses take over your machine.

I guess PCWorld didn't want to go back to the early 80's, but the RCA video disc was a disaster in the middle of the video tape revolution.

Quict time ate my Firefox. AND IT WONT UNINSTALL!!!

You guys get a Goof Award yourselves. Your links listed for each 5 lousy items is in error.
The fifth one down should read "Numbers 21 to 20". Item #20 was already included in the previous link!

The Worst Five
Numbers 6 to 10
Numbers 11 to 15
Numbers 16 to 20
Numbers 20 to 25
(Dis)Honorable Mention
The Complete List of the Worst 25
Want to comment on this story? Post your thoughts here.

SONY STRONGLY BELIEVES THAT THEIR MISFORTUNES DUE TO PIRATES AND THIEVES FROM CUSTOMERS LIKE US.

SONY USES THEIR MUSCLES & STUDIOS TO DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO PREVENT FURTHER DOWNFALL. SIGN OF DESPERATION.

IN REALITY, CUSTOMERS ARE MORE THAN HAPPY TO PAY FOR GOOD PRODUCTS AND SERVICES. MUSIC ON LINE SERVICES ARE DOING EXTREMELY WELL. CUSTOMERS ONLY PAY FOR THE SONG OR MOVIES THEY WANT TO LISTEN TO. THERE IS NO NEED FOR HUGE DISTRIBUTION. NO CD TO KEEP UP AND REPLACE WITH A SIMPLE MP3 PLAYERS.

NETFLIX AND THE REST OF MOVIES INDUSTRY ARE DOING WELL WITH THEIR EXCELLENT SERVICES: NO LATE FEE. SHIPPING TO YOUR DOOR...ETC.

SONY FAILS TO INNOVATE PRODUCTS & PROVIDE MORE SERVICES TO ITS WORLDWIDE CUSTOMERS.

SONY COULD NOT COMPETE WITH A NEWER AND BETTER PRODUCTS..SO DON'T BLAME ON YOUR CUSTOMERS FOR YOUR FAILURES.

LIKE PROSTITUTES INDUSTRY, WHETHER YOU LIKE OR NOT, IT SERVES ITS PURPOSE. SONY SHOULD NOT BLAME ON PIRATES FOR ITS FAILURES. IF SONY HAS A GUT, THEY SHOULD PICK ON CHINESE AND INDIANS.

BETTER YET, SONY SHOULD LEARN FROM PROSTITUTE INDUSTRY. PEOPLE ARE MORE THAN HAPPY TO PAY FOR SERVICES.

Laser discs? I don't think people will ever again have the opportunity to spend as much money on defunct technology as they did on these things.

I HAVE ACCUMULATED HUNDRED OF CDs & DVDs IN THE PAST 10 YEARS.

WITH A NEW DOWNLOAD SERVICES THERE IS NO NEED TO BUY SONGS YOU DON'T WANT TO LISTEN. SONY & ITS STUDIOS FORCE ME TO BUY THE ENTIRED CD WITH FEW SONGS TO LISTEN TO. MARKET HAS CHANGED AS BUYING HABITS.

WE CAN QUICKLY RENT MOVIES FROM NETFLIX AND AUTOMATICALLY DELIVER TO YOUR DOORS FOR FEW DOLLARS A MONTH. WHY WOULD I SPEND MONEY ON SONY AND COLLECT DUSTS.

SONY HAS BEEN FIGHTING OVER A NEW HI DEF DVD STANDARD AND FORMAT. SONY FORCES US TO USE THEIR STANDARD. WHILE SONY FIGHTING FOR YEARS, I AM NO LONGER BUYING ANY PRODUCTS FOR THE NEXT 2 YEARS, ESPECIALLY FROM SONY & ITS STUDIOS.

MICROSOF IS SHIPPING ITS GAMES PRODUCT WITH STANDARD. FUJITSU, SAMSUNG, DELL SHIPPING ITS NEW HI DEF TV AT A REASONABLE PRICES. THERE ARE MANY DVD PLAYERS OUT THERE WITH EQUALLY GOOD QUALITY. THE WORLD HAS CHANGED EXCEPT SONY.

NEW MP3 PLAYERS ARE MUCH BETTER & IT TAKES SONY VERY VERY LONG TO ACCEPT THE FACTS AND ADAPT TO A NEW MARKET.

SIMPLY BECAUSE MY COLLECTION WILL OBSOLETE VERY SOON WHEN INDUSTRY LAUNCHES A NEW HI DEF DVD.

SONY COMPUTERS & LAPTOPS ARE TOO EXPENSIVE WITH LITTLE TO OFFER. THERE ARE MANY STRONG COMPETITION IN THIS MARKET. IF SONY CANNOT HANDLE THE HEAT, THEY SHOULD GET OUT OF KITCHEN.

I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND CUSTOMERS TO BUY ANY PRODUCTS FROM SONY & ITS STUDIOS. THEY WANT TO DOMINATE AND CONTROL MARKET.

STOP BLAMING ON YOUR CUSTOMERS AS A PIRATE OR YOUR CAUSE OF FAILURES. SONY IS IN SELF DESTRUCTION.

The Infamous Cue Cat debacle.. I got sucked into that one. The one GOOD thing that came out of it though is that after the company tanked I made a very simple modification to the bar code scanner (just clipped one lead of a chip inside... google it ..) and now it is a fully functioning bar code scanner! Perfect for entering in movies to database programs and such!

right on

Definitely should include Quicktime in this list...also, Microsoft themselves refer to the debacle that is ME as Monumental Embarrassment...was at a Tech Tour and they apologized to us for that mess...good to see they know the error of their ways

Enjoyable article-never used AOL(thank God), and I just uninstalled Real Player from my hard drive. I remember most of the 23 other things but avoided all of them in the past 12 years except Imegoa Disk Drive which has long been outdated.

Ohhh you forgot about the crosspad. Just write on the pad and download it into your pc--what a waste, it never worked, was compatible with nothing and that came for a large pricetag!!!

Also what happened to including colecovisions first computer--oh now that was awful!

How come Microsoft Word didn't make the list? With its auto formatting that gives you "help" you never asked for, making up bullets and indents? And how about NetworkSolutions, with its "private" accounts hiding the identities of spammers and hackers? And what about VeriSign, with its unsolicited advertising scheme and its arrogant, huge, self-serving "contract"?

I disagree with the AOL listing - because it helped me a lot in selecting clients and suppliers. I would't touch anyone having an AOL email address with a 10-foot pole - so I saved tons of time by not dealing wits such people ;)

I agree with the Timex Datalink supporters - what an easy way to transfer data compared to today's meaningless, complikcated gadgets!

The list is great, though!

WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows

Awful!!! They just took WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS (which was the best word processor, ever) and laid a Windows interface on top of it.

Absolutely dreadful!

Thank heaven AOL was ranked the worst. It has been and always will be the worst offer ever.

At least 8 or 10 of the not so good programs and systems listed in the article had stung me, Very good job on compiling this list it backs up some of my claims to others.

I used to use the AOL Cds that came in the mail for frizbees. They worked pretty well too. 8)

I COMEND PCWORLD FOR THEIR UNBIASED REVIEWS AND COMMENTS.

I don't use Windows heavily these days, but, Windows ME being on this list when the totally overrated Windows 98 isn't is just illogical. It wasn't at all impressive for it's time, but I really don't think it was worse than 98 SE... I used Windows ME until I switched to Windows 2000 a year later, and in that time I can only conclude that it wasn't any worse than the other non-NT Windows OSes. In fact, it had a few features that were useful for me at the time which made it an ok choice for me.

I don't use Windows very much these days but, pretty much any non-NT Windows wasn't reliable, Windows ME was not alone in this.

As someone who uses a unix-like OS on a daily basis, I'm rather baffled by the snobbery that the GNU/Linux users present on this thread. They act like Linux is a drop in replacement for Windows, which it isn't really. Maybe *nix works well for me, but that doesn't make NT crash all the time or make it's core lousy, or make any of the unicies (those "desktop linux" distributions are not as user friendly as a mac or windows) suitable for my mother to use.

That aside, the UNIX Haters Handbook has some criticisms of unix that are still relevant today, and I never get why Windows NT gets so heavily criticised considering it's based on a solid VMS-like core. So, it's got MS droids working on it, but from a kernel perspective, it's a solid OS.

I do use unix but I never get why some linux users "market" their os so dishonestly. I guess they don't like Windows because "the man" markets it, they just use the software licensing bit to hide that fact. But really, if Windows were open source, I think they would still be trashing it.

It's funny how Apple appears on this list and the dishonorable mention one multiple times. It's funny how MS failures are capitalized on and made into national news, whereas a failure from Apple is just quietly hidden.

What about the IBM PS2? The PS2 was the company's attempt to re-acquire the PC market share lost in the late 1980s to companies like Compaq and other IBM "cloners." Problem was that it orphaned anyone who used cards that were compatible with the original PC architecture. Even IBM advertised that the PS2 would "work alongside (rather than be compatible with or replace)" your PC. After many companies switched to the PS2 and had to buy new peripherals, while others stuck with the original PC architecture and saved gobs of money, IBM's share of the PC market plummeted even further, until it was virtually out of the picture. Meanwhile, Compaq became a major player in the PC world.

Please, please, PLEASE! Give us in Support a chance to vent on the nightmares we were forced to support! How about GlobalVillage?s nightmare ?upgrade? to the wonderful voice and fax software that came as part of the installed software of so many PCs back in the 90?s. There was no ?upgrade? just a program that destroyed everything that came before and then refused to work at all. And mangelment knew that before they sold it to the first customer.

Or how about HP?s computers with a known defective hard drive that HP would replace but not the pre-installed software like Windows?

Oh, let us have leave to tell our dark stories around the dusky camp fire and moan over the opportunities lost or abandoned out of egos with unquenchable thirst!

I don't think the OQO deserves to be on the list - sure it's small, but that's the whole idea. I think it's an excellent stab at the ultimate ultraportable.

in defense of AOL... AOL is an easy target.. It is and was the biggest ISP going.. On could argue it brought the masses online... Nerds may not like that fact.. but it brought one thing to the table no other ISP did at the time EASE OF USE... I think PC World should at least aknowledge that AOL was a major force in bringing the Internet to the mainstream... Sure AOL has and had its failings.. but even the best of tech companies have a closet full of shit they'd like to forget.

AOL was the first major ISP to introduce flat rate pricing

AOL gave us AIM

AOL helped my Mom get online

AOL pioneered online advertising

AOL created a safe environment for my kids (pareental controls)

AOL pushed the broadband envelope with media rich content

AOL has put the end user first with nearly every release of its software

PC World is a bit smug and elitist by authoring this story... I hope you still have some advertisers for next month..

Iomega's Bernoulli's weren't much better. The first, a 10MB, was a huge contraption with a large floppy-like disk inside. Fortunately, removable hard disks became available and affordable. This was a better solution.

How about annoying popups like the one you used in this article?

I'm glad the IBM Deathstar 75GXP was included. Too bad I'm in Singapore and wasn't applicable for the class action suit.

The 75GXP caused tremendous pain and effort over roughly a period of one year, where my 75GB drive was practically useless since I could not store much data in it, for fear of the Click Of Death. I must have gone through at least four 75GXPs, even going straight to the IBM office.

You know how the problem ended? When I asked for my 75GXP to be changed to the 120GXP.

I remember going to best buy and asking them to stop selling Syncronys SoftRAM. I had bought and found that it did not work at all and actually slowed down the system. I had got my refund before syncronys had pulled the product from the shelf. It was very difficult to remove the software from your PC. Anyway Best Buy said they would not stop selling it and that it was their number one software product. Each store was selling between 25 - 50 copies per day. I stood in one store and informed potential buys of their big mistake for about an hour. I think I saved 5 or 6 people before the store asked me to leave.

How can Atari's E.T. not make the list. It was so bad that they dumbed over 5 million unsold copies in the New Mexico desert!

How about MSN Messenger 7.5 also McAfee virus scan. I installed McAfee and now can't get rid of it.

Just a quick point...Technology innovation is driven by trying stuff and taking risks. You really never know what will be successful but one can only find out by trying. This is why so many of the companies listed here with "stinkers" also spend tons of cash on R&D...Open your minds up people.

Colorado QIC 120 Tape Drives for PC. Awful Invention that left blisters in my stomache.

I was one of the millions of AOL members that never paid. I signed up 9 times before quitting for good. Most of this was in their first two years of existence. During the days when it was 10 hours or 30 days before you had to start paying $9.95. They did limit me by not allowing you to use the same credit card within one year for free service. The thing I had wished I had never done was to throw away a letter that appeared to be hand signed by Steve Case. In the letter, he used a few expletives while calling me a cheep bastard. I bet that would be worth something today.

For me, it was my first 'laptop'- built by Topp PC, in 1990. They dared to call it a 'Toshiba 386SX clone'. Oh, it could approach 386 capability... if it had a math co-processor. It had no mouse, no modem, no CD-ROM drive, a plasma screen, 40MB hard drive and 756K of RAM. It would actually accept a floppy load of Windows... but couldn't figure out what to do with it. Weight: 21 lb; AC power only; cost: almost $3K. (Most expensive boat anchor I've ever owned.)

Excellent article. Well written and funny as hell. Bravo. Good work.

I am glad America Online has been exposed for the piece of crap service it is and always has been. My sorrow is that my mother still subscribes to AOL only to keep her email addres which she has had for 15 years. Otherwise, she has absolutely no use for AOL, but she still pays $25 a month for it.

To justify the wasted money on this useless service, we always say that AOL comes in handy for providing free AOL accounts to the underachievers and deadbeats in the family who don't want to pay for their own Internet access.

But in all fairness, AOL does have some value. It's always there if you are in an Internet bind. Whenever I am low on cash and cant pay my broadband bills, AOL is always there with it's free 1000 hours for me to leech off of until I get my real access back. The tin cans and DVD cases that hold their free installation discs are also cool for holding stuff in. :)

I have realplayer version 10 and I love it. Much easier to use than the windows player. Better sound also. As far as playing media files- I still do get files that realplayer can't open (no codec) but IRFANVIEW (free download) plays most anything.

Am I showing my age by reminding everyone out there of the Timex Sinclair 1000?

I am surprised to see th Iomega ZIP drive. At the time of its release, it was an excellent way to store large files and make them portable to share across systems. Granted their future products have not been so fantastic, but the Iomega ZIP drive was awesome. We ar enow in a era of CDs and DVDs at much higher speeds and lower cost, but back in the day the ZIP DRIVE was a workhorse. AOL is easy to attack, but how many people have had or still use AOL...you can't dismiss longevity and market penetration. I'm not saying its great, but for many that was the service that exposed them to the WEB, today there are many more options of course, but AOL is cheap shot!

1. Trumpet WinSock (anyone who used the Win 3.1 to Win95 UPGRADE diskettes instead of doing a full install is familiar with this hellish file)

2. Cyrix CPUs

3. Novell NetWare 5 to current

What about the ATARI 4K computer circa 1983? They did absolutely nothing. It was a game console that looked like a computer. I think there were only about 10 games ever made for it and absolutely no other usable software was available. I don't think they ever developed word processor or spreadsheet software. I tried to program on it once and then found out it wouldn't do string variables. The only storage device available was a cassette tape drive and it only worked half the time. The keyboard was a flat touch; great on your microwave, absolutely aweful for typing. It still sits in my folks attic to this day. In about two years, it'll turn 25 and might be worth something as a museum piece. That's because probably everybody else pitched it once they figured out it couldn't do anything.

"Apple Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (1997): Learning nothing from Gateway 2000's fiasco a couple of year's earlier with its 10th Anniversary PC, Apple in 1997 released a specially designed bronze-colored Mac to celebrate its 20th year of making computers."

You must mean the other way around. Gateway was 2000, Apple was 1997 (Gateway was 3 years later, not earlier)

I have 3:

1. Starforce copy protection: Takes forever to install, and takes forever to start a game everytime. One of the employees actually told people to pirate a game that didn't use it.

2. Nokia N-Gage: Pointless cell phone - handheld video game system. No one bought it, no one liked it, and Nokia would never acknowledge their mistake.

3. Infinium Phantom: The vaporware console still has never surfaced and investors still give money to the company. It is quite hilarious

You could have mentioned Gator . Spyware that could slow down any system.

A few Gateway sytsems come to mind.
The 614GE and 816GM plus a few other similar models had a nasty bios problem. They would not do a Windows restore.

Ink Jet - or stink jet. Nothing like a $500 all-in-one that has an ink cartridge that will print 15 pages, yes this is true HP packages or has packaged Ink Jets with limited duration cartridges for some time. So that as soon as you purchase that new printer. You start your 'lifetime" subscription to $35 cartridges that last for about a ream of paper. The cost per copy is astronomical! Additionally, I have never seen software from HP that performs as well as advertised. Get yourself a decent lowcost laser. Send your pictures to a photo printer at a local super market for 20 cents a copy. Its much cheaper than home printing and much higher quality.

The LS-120 drives sucked pretty bad when they were dumped on the market. I worked a company that sold about 20,000 of these little jewels. At least 5,000 came back DOA. It was a good idea (maybe), but very few of the motherboards could recognize them.

Divx worked, I sold hundreds of them and when it was sold to warner bro. they stoped it in favor of their DVD's.

Aol tought me to ask what country my support help was from, India didn't hack it.

TRS-80, sold them too, but having your software supplier bought out from under you does not make for good service. They used Basic before Bill bought it and changed it, until 4.3 or such when the help screen was put back in noone could work Basic.

bill always found a market and then bought the company, saves research money.

one word, Prodigy.

Well, one of my worst tech gadgets had to be the Kenwood 72X Cd-rom...This thing was supposed to be lightning fast and reliable. And boy was it fast....fast to the graveyard. Must have lasted a month. then it was a paper weight. lol

I worked for Computer City when Microsoft Bob came out. We had 100 copies and actually had 150 returned.

I have to add my vote for taking the Timex DataLink Watch off the list. It just plain worked as advertised. In fact, one of my co-workers is still using one of the original ones.

A couple of people have taken shots at the PS/2 with MCA (microchannel architecture) bus. Have you forgotten the torture device that was EISA? IBM didn't want to share at that point, they felt burnt by the ISA clone wars. But if they had, we might all be singing a different tune.

I worked with most of the major big server vendors equipment, and frankly the IBM MCA machines, while expensive, just worked. They also were some of the easiest gear to work on. You could completely disassemble one without a screwdriver, while Compaq, Dell, etc. required techs to carry an emergency kit of every small screw known to mankind.

There certainly weren't a lot of MCA adapters available, but at the time, in a corporate environment there wasn't a lot needed - basic network and host (AS/400, mainframe, etc.) adapters were available.

Back in the day, my large corporate clients with Novell Netware, IBM PS/2 servers and clients, and 16Mb/s Token-Ring got a lot of bang for the buck.

The others, who primarily had Novell, Compaq, and 10Mb/s Ethernet (remember Lattisnet hubs) spent less up-front, but had dramatically higher support costs.

I will certainly agree that the conditions were somewhat different for small/medium businesses. However if you had hundreds/thousands of users IBM started to make a whole lot of sense.

On a related note, I have to nominate Novell's IPX networking as a candidate for the list. Sure, it was great on your LAN, but as soon as you got into WAN connectivity it turned into a nightmare. (I won't even get into Appletalk. Yuck!)

Remeber those Hit Clips? About $10 for a player and $2-$4 for a part of a song (about 30 seconds to a minute long).

I am a happy Windows ME user and have no problems like the ones mentioned in the article. I suppose it depends on your system components.
About AOL, thank you. I totally agree. I remember when their version 5.0 was called the "upgrade of death" and class action suits were filed. Users have to reformat their hard drives to get rid of AOL's garbage files.

You oughtta do stupid retarded spyware... like something called SPY FALCON. Its totally useless as a virus but irritating as all shit. HOW DO YOU GET RID OF THIS PIECE OF CRAP?

Oh yes, the Memory Stick family, millions of ppl are suffering from it out there even now!

I have heard many people say that windows ME was the worst ever! Well I bought a Pacard Bell right when the Pentium II came out, it was the fastest Pentium processor at the time. The computer came with windows 95. Problems from day 1! It never worked right. I installed Windows ME, instant fix! To this day the computer works flawless! It hasn't been hooked up to the internet for a few years but worked excellent when it was. I must have gotten a good one. My parents had windows 98 on their computer and it was so bad that I had to purchase a new hard drive and install windows xp. But that windows ME has done me no wrong.

Why do I seem to be the only one to be satisfied with AOL? Compared with Tiscali AOL was like a breath of fresh air. Their broadband service is more than adequate.The amount of advertising is a lot less than in your average newspaper. I like the ease of getting ones e-mail & the 'Keyword' facility is useful. I like the way one can organise the toolbar. AOL will do me for the timebeing.

Read about halfway through the comments and didn't see it: Gator. Anyone should have been smart enough to see this one coming...but man was it a pain to get off of other people's computers.

In the same spirit: weatherbug.

Other nominees: original imacs (especially with the keyboard with the bumps on the wrong keys).

Microsoft Office 2000 era "Features". Namely "helper" characters, auto-formating, menus that auto-hide their contents from you, a bizarre set of features that aren't installed by default (why not just install the picture editor to begin with?).

Oakeley Thump Sunglasses/mp3 players. They had to beg people to take these things.

I'd take the zip drive off. Before CD-Rs were cheap and fast to burn, zip drives were the bomb. I was all about these when I started college in 2000. Disks didn't cut it and CDs weren't throwaway cheap yet.

Judging by some commenters (who in 2006 still don't seem to get it)...THE CAPS LOCK KEY: MAKES IT REALLY EASY TO SHOUT AT PEOPLE OVER THE INTERNET!!!!1 MY POINT MAKES MORE SENSE NOW BECAUSE THE LETTERS ARE TALLER...ughhh

Windows Operating System ----- Worst invention, ever.

Macromedia products being loud and annoying on webpages and covering everything. They are destroying the web.

Swatch "Internet time"
3DO's game Console
"Gun" controller for PC games
Wii Controller (2006-2007)
Pacard Bell "multimedia" OS

6 years ago a computer company developed a computer inside a LCD monitor which caused the all thing to heat up and they recalled the all thing....

Boy, there are lots of whiners. I say you did an admirable job here.

I can recall the local IBM/Apple dealers with piles of PC junior keyboards waiting to go back for an exchange. (-: I had an apple IIe and then a Kaypro II :-)

And the click of death - oh man, anyone that didn't hear it had to be on another planet. The IOmega tape drives were just about as bad - if you could get them to work.

I've been with Firefox since it came out. Impressive.

me only no.4?!!? more like 2. it was the worst thing eva. it frozze when u turned it on, went near it or turn it off. and the spyware it got....

What about all the software versions we had to buy to stay current. I'm sure I have spent $10k on Photshop, etc. just to stay up with OS changes and bug fixes. No wonder people pirate.

Did we forget the I-Opener? For a small price, you could purchase a Web appliance that used a QNX operating system and did everything through a Netscape browser. But the company forgot to require the ISP sign-up at the time purchase and wound up selling a substantial portion of its inventory to help create a widespread hardware hacker phenomenon, not matter how hard they tried to close the barn door after the cows got out. The story should be a grad school case study.

IBM's microchannel should be on the list. Now only was it propritory hardware, the setup disk were needed after a battery change. And if you moved a card, it was necessary to run the setup from the floppies again. Somewhere Dr Soloman antivirus after Mcafee took it over. And although it was ahead of it's time, DR DOS/ Novell DOS. AND Lexmark printers!!! I had a number of them die in just weeks after the warrenty ran out. I am sure there are plenty of other products that should be/would be on a top (or is is the bottom??) 100 list.

So where's the Philips DCC, a digital compact cassette that could be used as a backup mechanism! DCC was primairly targeted for music.

I'm surprised AOL is on the list of "bad products". I thought AOL was a virus!

Fantastic list! i too was burned by more than a couple of these products, AOL definitely being the #1 for me. Never mind their notoriously slow service, the bizarre gateway systems that made recieving pop mail from certain non-aol accounts when dialed up through aol almost impossible, or that horrible web browser.

The worst part of aol for me is the sleazy way they treat customers who try to leave the service. I've known street gang members who had an easier time quitting than aol customers.

The entire 'terminating my service' phone call to aol took me almost an hour of explaining, and holding and listening to marketing spiels, and downright dirty tricks, like; 'just to show there's no hard feelings we'll give you a month of service free.' Meaning, we've kept you on the phone for 45 minutes and now we havent cancelled your service at all, you'll still have to remember to call again in 30 days or we'll start billing you again.

And that wasn't the end of it. for 2 weeks after i cancelled the service, i received phone calls sometimes 2 times a day from aol telemarketers bugging me to re-establish my service. It was only after i asked to talk to a supervisor and threatened to introduce them to my lawyer that they stopped the harrassment.

The only reason i used them in the first place was because i had had credit problems and couldn't get access to the internet without a credit card, except for AOL who allowed billing to my phone bill. For an extra fee, naturally.

An awful awful company that prays on the poor and the computer ignorant. terrible people, all of them.

one more: how about the 'disposable digital camera?' you pay $20 for a digital camera that takes 25 pics, then return it to the store where they charge you another $15 to 'develop' it and then you never get the camera back! another scam that tries to prey on people who don't understand the technology and are afraid they won't be able to use a 'real' digital camera.

Lovely article. Good that you included Real Player and Windows ME. I also happened to be a victim of the IBM Deskstar HDD. Bought a 30gig 7200 rpm drive when it just launched, paid a whopping 1800 ZAR (approx. $300). A few months later the drive completely gave in and IBM South Africa refused to refund \ replace the drive even though it was very much still under warranty. They claimed I should get a refund from the supplier I bought it from even though they were aware that the supplier had closed down. I was left with a busted HDD that I eventually had to throw away. Shame on IBM. I subsequently promised to forever boycott IBM.

Lovely article. Good that you included Real Player and Windows ME. I also happened to be a victim of the IBM Deskstar HDD. Bought a 30gig 7200 rpm drive when it just launched must have been in 2000 or so. I paid a whopping 1800 ZAR (approx. $300) for it. A few months later the drive completely gave in and IBM South Africa refused to refund \ replace the drive even though it was very much still under warranty. They claimed I should get a refund from the supplier I bought it from even though they were aware that the supplier had closed down. I was left with a busted HDD that I eventually had to throw away. Shame on IBM. I subsequently promised to forever boycott IBM.

The QueCat actually has an excellent use today. There is some DVD cataloging software that is free that works amazingly well. Simply swipe the UPC of your DVD case and you get a screen pop of that DVD, hit OK, and it's added to your database.

How about Windows (All), Office 2007, WGA, and Firefox?

You forgot to Norton Products

No one has mentioned Palm:

Palm m105: After a while, all the memory is lost when you replace the batteries. (They got sued for this)

I got a new one:

Tungsten E2: Works better (although it does reset itself every once in a while) but it has this incredibly, annoying, headache inducing screen whine! Drives me crazy!

I'm hoping the free one I'll be recieving as settlement from the lawsuit will be better. I'm not counting on it.

The biggest reliability problem with Windows ME was poorly written drivers. That is why some people have no trouble at all with ME but others couldn't run a computer for sixty seconds without something crashing. ME was only designed to give people a few more years to run their old apps before having to transition to Win2k/XP. Why spend any time getting ME done right if you are just going to throw it away in a few years.

I LOVED my Timex Datalink watch. The biggest problem Timex had was when it tried to make it USB-compatible. Under Win 9x the watch worked perfectly. In fact, I gave it a great review in '95 when it came out. The USB version was awful -- it never worked right and was very uncomfortable. I'd use my old one still if it was XP compatible, but alas, it's not, so I need to depend on my BlackBerry.

I just e-mailed this to the editor:

I would like to remind you of one thing: Hindsight is 20/20.

Easy hits worth the laugh can be had knocking Priceline.com gas & groceries, or the the gaggle of underpowered products (for the time): Pippin, FreePC, Gateway 10th Anniversary PC, 'Portable Mac'. These were bad from the gate, and known to be bad by the producers. I loved the 'Deskstar' / 'Deathstar' reference. Too funny!

But, to be fair, I would remind you that with nothing ventured, nothing is gained when it comes to Pioneers Apple Newton, WebTV.
They were a little ahead of their time for the technology of the period.

Great, Magnificent Article! Computers and gadgets are a money pit, anyway. Bad ideas flung like monkey feces on the public aught to be a hanging offense. Now do one on bad software. Go get 'em guys!

Oh, yes! I remember WebTV. In January 2001, I went to Denver, CO for a job interview. My hotel had Internet access...in the form of WebTV. What a nightmare! Cumbersome way to navigate through a webpage, and don't get me started on checking my web-based email account. It goes to show that even software engineers and programmers can come up with one of the most costly and unimaginative ways of doing things.

Hmm...I can leave Windows Me running for days without crashing...

Good list, I had even forgotton about some. (ie WinMe). One thing that can go on the next list is Pinnacle's Studio 10. This is the buggiest software I've ever had the displeasure of using, the only thing that's worse than the product itself is the tech support.

Good list. What a laugh. I've almost forgotten some of the disasters mentioned.

Can anyone remember Copeland? It was meant to be Apple's new 32 bit, pre-emptive multi-tasking, memory protected operating system to replace the crash prone System 7 (or was it 9?). "Those who live on hope die fasting". Eventually, OsX came along but most of the faithful had long since died.

Seriously, if you're one of these people that needed AOL to access the internet, then you're one of the people who SHOULD NOT have a PC. I know how easy Windows is to screw up, but there's a lot and I mean a LOT of stupid people out there, who know two things about PCs: Jack and sh-t. And jack has left town. Although to Microsoft's and to those people's credit, they do keep us techs in business. Remember the age old credo: Stupidity not only reigns, it pours.

The worst line of computers ever produced was IBM's PS/2 product line. I had to manage 70 of these pieces of junk in early 90's. That's why I'm bald now. You had to configure everything with a configuration floppy. The software was buggy and caused horrible problems. The worst of all was model PS/2 70. They were very expensive PC's. Network adapters etc. cost dearly becaue of IBM's microchannel.

Don't forget Lotus Notes !
The worst of the most used software.

Is it possible to have so many good ideas and build them so bad ?
Is it possible to be the most not standard software ?

Yes, you've got Notes !

Nintendo Virtual boy and Sega 32x

Let's not forget Syquest Disks.
Those things would die in a year or so. I used to work at a kinko's. We'd get dead Syquests avery week. Eventually we stopped accepting them when zip disks & cd-rs caught on.

The Phantom videogame console should deserve special mention as well.

The Mac Portable did run from AC with exactly the same kind of AC adapter every laptop uses. Further, Apple never marketed it as a laptop computer or even a notebook. It's simply portable, had 10 hour battery life, and offered Mac users their familiar GUI and an era when PC laptops meant DOS or some horrid version of Windows.

The Pippin was never sold by Apple, so calling is the "Apple Pippin" is disingenuous. Bandai made and sold it - something that should be obvious from following the link included in this article. Yes, it was a bad idea created in conjunction with Apple, but Our Favorite Fruit Company never put its own name on the product.

As several have mentioned, the IBM PC Portable should definitely have made your list.

I LOVE cheap shots.. you guys rock.. I love it when people stick it to other people (or companies).. That's why I love FOX NEWS.. you guys are like the FOX NEWS of tech news.. Keep stickin' it to powers that be. The little guy needs more of your brand of journalism.

Please go after more companies. This story was so funny.. I loved it. Horay for PC World..

Good job overall. I had fun reading and remembering some of these technology messes. You did forget one I think is rather important. When I bought my first computer in 1995, it was touted as one of the most advanced you could buy at the time. This was one of the very first IBM Aptiva's. One of the big features touted in sales for it was the M-Wave card. This little disaster was in fact a combination sound and modem card. Yet so cheaply made and just plain bad did this piece of junk turn out to be that IBM lost a class action suit filed about it a few years later. If only I had kept my receipt that long. $100 would have been mine. Well, by the time all this was settled I was building my own computers anyway. I do have to give IBM some credit though. If it wasn't for all the work and time spent trying to fix this Aptiva all the time, I might never have learned all that I know about computers today.

Another less common problem with this same machine were the speakers that came with it. I came home one night to find my fire alarm blazing away. Fortunately, the power side of one these units was only smoldering away on my desk. This remains the only near fire that happened to any piece of technology I've ever bought.

All these years I have been right. I signed on to AOL in 1995. It took me 10 years and numerous letters from my attorney to finally get them out of my life. They were like freaking stalking me...my kids... my mom...it was for real a total nightmare. I have a friend that for FIVE YEARS has been receiving '3 free months of service' to decide if they want to keep AOL or not though they say NO we don't want 3 more months. These AOLholes should all be jailed, starting at the top.

AOL. I used to work for a ISP and believe it or not, certain early AOL versions would remove the files 'winsock.dll' and "wsock32.dll" from people's computers with Win 95 or Win 98 during installation to the point where when you uninstalled AOL, you could not use anyone else's dialup until these files were restored.

OS/2 Warp. Useless and bloated.

iCube, the computer that somehow cracked it's lexan case. Experts say it was due to the excessive heat with no ventilation

The first iMac with the CD-ROM that had the flip door. I had a friend who did IT for the local school system and he stated that these things broke constantly. Replaced by the Cd-ROM that all you did was inser the CD.

Apple's 17" monitor that looked like an alien from Space Invaders that Apple loved to package deal with the G3. The high voltage wires powering the cathode ray tube were too close to the video card wires on the PCB assembly to where arcing occurred between them and eventual destruction of your video card because the high voltage zapped the video card.

Great list !!
But I missed the Sony MiniDisc and
Apple's Rapsody (Cross Platform OS) the step between NEXT and Mac OSX.

Actually I think they have forgotten the terrible LS120 disk drive.

I had a Timex Data Link Watch and loved it. It was ahead of it's time at the time.

Some duds I've had personal, painful experience with:

1). WordPerfect version 6.0 for Windows. Although Novell fixed the product with version 6.1, for a while it was really painful being a WordPerfect shop;

2). IBM's DisplayWrite program. Hey, we can emulate a dedicated word processing station! You want bold, type an option # between 67 and 158?!

3). High density, 5.25 inch diskettes. They worked, but most people used double density. The drives were just compatible enough to cause endless problems, but always for "other people". So you had to explain why a person not experiencing a problem, was the cause of a problem.

I would like to add the following product to the list of total failures:

The Osbourne II

Not because it was such a bad product, but the good Adam Osbourne managed to kill his own company by announcing version II long before it was market ready and thereby killing the sales of Mark I.

DOS 1.0 & the Intel 8088. Gates was so dumb, he based this OS on CPM rather than on Unix (widely available at the time), VMS, or even IBM'S VM/CMS (which gave each mainframe user a "personal" mainframe). The OS didn't even support a directory structure until version 3.1. And the memory model? Remember the 640K limit that led to numerous painful workarounds and addons? Probably 80% of the problems we have today with the Wintel standard are due to the design of the first IBM PC and DOS.

IBM XT - first 10MB hard drive. One by one, after about a year, each XT's drive failed in order of purchase. And one run of drives for the IBM AT had a "spin" problem. Periodically you had to remove the drive and literally spin a component on the bottom to get it working again.

In the networking field: Token Ring and the first 10-15 years of various incarnations of Microsoft's NOS. (Some people might include Arcnet & Banyan here, but I think they were good-faith efforts in a new industry.)

Many might argue that Microsoft still doesn't have either a first- class OS or first-class NOS.

Why isn't Lotus Notes in this list??
Indeed, why isn't it at the top of the list??

Thanks to Jeff, Mike, D. Crawford & Chuck (G.), I think, for reminding me of the Trash-80, PS/2, OS2, EISA, and DOS 4.0. Yuck is right.

Then, of course, there was Windows NT - which made W98 the computer equivalent of a first-class wine.

As for the hit on Ethernet vs. Token Ring. I had thought the Arcnet/Ethernet/TR war had been decisively and deservedly won by Ethernet - years ago. I'm amazed that anybody still believes TR was better. Ethernet was fast & simple to manage. And every card came with a unique address. No futzing around with jumpers or complicated mgt. tables.

I found this list very entertaining and sometimes surprising. IE6 a stinker? I thought the PC world in general was in love with 6. I guess i was wrong. Seeing the Mac Portable (luggable) included should have been representational for the whole laptop category of the era, as I remember quite a few other brand name PC 'luggables' that were contemporaries. I agree also, that the first generations of Newtons sucked big-time. I'm surprised they even made it to 97 when they came out with the MessagePad 2000. THAT one was great. I still use mine today. Yeah, I gotta go and buy this issue for interest sake. I like.

#1 on your list should be Lotus Notes. The only application that comes with another application just to kill the main application whose state is normally locked up. The kill app is only useful when Notes has not locked up the entire machine!

Oh yeah, one more thing. Albeit overly expensive, the Apple Twentieth Anniversary Mac turned heads and inspired industrial designers worldwide. And now it is highly collected and commands prices that exceed that of the original, I don't think I would have put that in a Hall of Shame. I have one and it is hard to find hardware on the market today that is so inspired. (Yes mine still works very well, thank you. I use it to run Photoshop 4 and Illustrator 7 periodically. Lovely AND ?ber-stylish performer. More than I can say of Apple's current crop of 'bland'.)

There should be a #1 productivity killer list and I'd vote Notes to be #1. It's just incredible how shops twist and turn this thing to be everything that it's just not fit to do. Each day I am thankful that they remembered to include Ctrl-Break support to stop a long-running operation. If they can do that, why can't they allow me to search for documents in the background, delete docs in the background, sort docs in the background, while I check on new mail or open a database??? It must be because IBM is behind it that no one dare talk about the emperor's new clothes!

Don't forget to include the painful transformation of the handy Norton tools to a crappy symantec suites. The most notorious example Ghost 10.

I was in the Free-Pc Program. Wonderful program. Met lots of great people who are still friends. They let us take off the ads and keep the pc and it was great.

Thank you Free-Pc for giving me my pc.

Great story! I couldn't agree with you more about AOL! I have signed up with them three times over the years and each time have canceled my service in the first week!
Also, RealPlayer has been a real pain for me! In fact, I deinstalled it (again) today.
The only other product on your list that I've had to no choice but to tolerate is the Internet Explorer 6.0; it's our company standard...

America Online is not the worst technology product of all time. If you go back to the late 80s, when the service first launched, it was far superior to most other services at the time. Personally I found Prodigy slow and cumbersome. CompuServe had great content, but was confusing and hard to use and expensive. The Source was just plain expensive and also hard to use. America Online was cheaper than CompuServe, The Source, and Delphi. Only Prodigy was cheaper.

And AOL was not born out of PC-Link, a service for Tandy users which was completely separate system but would later be merged with AOL. America Online was actually born out of AppleLink: Personal Edition, a service for Apple II and then eventually Macintosh computers.

America Online helped introduce millions of people to the online world, and perhaps even to the Internet long before mainstream ISPs existed. I distinctly remember mainstream broadband Internet ISPs appearing years after AOL first connected to the Internet. Prior to then you were stuck with regional non broadband providers that would appear and disappear overnight.

If anything you have a beef with AOL's advertising methods which prior to then, no one had ever conceived of such mass penetration methods for computers or online services. One thing is for certain, it worked a little too well. An America Online grew from thousands to millions overnight.

I also disagree with dBase IV being on the list. My first tech job was programming dbIV, and I preferred it well over dbIII. The reason for Ashton Tate's downfall was not having a Windows database product in the market in a timely enough fashion. By the time they did, it was poorly constructed, and nowhere near as flexible as prior versions.

I do agree with many of the contributors mentioning Lotus Notes. I use Lotus Notes to this day and HATE IT WITH A PASSION. It's neither a great database nor a great email system.

I'm totally surprised you failed to mention the ill-conceived and problem-plauged Apple III. Or what about the first Lisa with the twiggy drives?

You also forgot the Cauzin Softstrip reader. Slow, a pain to use.

Or what about PS2 connections for mouse and keyboard which are not interchangable but plug into each others connections? Who came up with that bright idea?

Windows ME < Sony Rootkit?
RealPlayer < Micorosft BOB?

Some of these rankings are a bit harsh

The process of unsubscribing from AOL (AOHell), is pure hell on earth, one of the most disturbing and enraging events known to man! AOL deserves the #1 slot! This is a great day!

You left out IBM Topview and Lotus Jazz...such short memories.

Even Lotus joked that, in Jazz's first month of release, they received more in returns than they had shipped out (implying that even pirated copies were returned to the company).

The Osborne 1 with its three inch screen in a case larger than the average sewing machine. CRTs were not that expensive in the 80s.

A great analytical and unbiased research report.I also became a victim of two of mentioned cutting edge technologies and could hardly save my skin.

Oh, God. When I got my first computer back in 2000, its default OS was #4 on the Worst 25 Tech Products. Windows ME was a complete piece of garbage. It was slow, produced countless "blue screens of death", and it caused me to reset my computer back to its factory settings way too many times. When Windows XP came out, I considered it to be a Godsend, and I haven't looked back since.

I like what was posted but why was Windows 98 left out? They should have included it.

If any product that deserves 1st place, it's AOL. But what is obscene is that Steve Case made millions selling this garbage.

Something to add to to the dishonorable mention list -- Radio Shack's TRS-80 PC. It was the first PC I used. Almost didn't get into grad school because it ate all my application essays. Argh!

MS Bob, it was kinda cute; did like its database for the home, had lots of stuff in it. Wish I could find another product with the "everything" database.

There are three prior comments on the DataLink watch and I could not agree more. It was a marvel when it was new and it is still a great tool. The only down side was the excessively heavy case. Mine is 10 years old and it is still the best watch I've owned. It does not belong on this list and you owe somebody an apology.

Mr f*&king Clippy...

Nuff said.

I'm suprised the string of failures of some low end seagate harddrives that failed due to very poor clean room practices in their china assembly plants.
I replaced 50 of these all were from the china plants dissection of a few reviled foriegn object damage ie dust and even hair.
Also the sonyroot kit should get number one as sony not only had to replace ever cd with it they got sued and lost many customers.
Other dishonorable mentions the intel core series aka yohna for not supporting EMT64/AMD64 extentions there was no excuse for this when even semprons are 64bit now.

Great article. Lots of folks getting worked up about things that didn't work!
I had one of those Timex watches, other than that I didn't make the top 25.

I'm trying to understand what the purpose of this article was for? Outdated technology that in some instances are decades old - who cares? BORING! Personally I purchased the OQO 01+ which was released LAST YEAR (their second release I might add) and has significantly increased performance and speed. Grab your bifocals if its such an issue for you.

Very specifically, I never understood the Intel 486 chip. The Pentium was released shortly after the 486, after many oompaies (and universities) invested heavliy in 486 boxes. My recollection is based upon the release of the 486 and the announcement of the pentium within the 9-12 months of each-other.

as for worst, RealPlayer would get my vote...awful awful program.

Anybody who had to carry around the Kaypro II very much will never forget it. Having one arm stretched longer than the other is an effective reminder. My new laptop is 2.6 lbs. That's 1/10th the weight of the Kaypro.
http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html

I guess the PC version of Quicktime must be different than the Mac version because on my G5 tower, Quicktime is an elegant piece of software which seamlessly operates in the background to play all of my media files with no problems whatsoever (streaming, internet, hard drive, video, music, whatever, no problems with ANY of them). WMV and RealPlayer, on the other hand are both problem children which work occasionally at best. WMV can't even scrub within a video, without freezing and reloading the entire file, for goodness' sake! And I'll take iTunes over any of the awful programs which are available on my workplace PC any time.

Who left off Netscape 4+ AHHH!!!!
How about the mac Lisa??? I think she and MS Bob got married...

The products on the 25 worst tech products list are all available on Ebay (except for AOL). Some are sold as cheap paper weights and others as expensive collectors items. The winning bidders receive a one year free subscription to both AOL and PC magazine.

I'm quite happy with my Apple laptop and GASP!!! Webtv. (Yes, we're still around :)

The article was a good read.

People, please. Windows 98 was leagues better than Windows ME. LEAGUES BETTER. If you breathed on Windows ME, you'd get a blue screen of death or worse, the operating system wouldn't boot at all.

It was a horrendous product.

Gotta be norton systemworks as #1

How could these Three not make the top 25 :
IBM PS/2 MCA (Micro Channel Archetecture). IBM's attempt to force the PC industry away from the standard ISA for PC bus design so they could collect royalties. What a Pain in the butt for System engineers and technicians having to deal with those Configuration floppies everytime you wanted to add hardware or change settings.

Also Microsoft Office starting with version 4.3 and up. Its macro language (VB for applications) is the equivalent of Guttenberg's printing press for Macro Viruses.

Last but not least ActiveX and the web developers who use it. You can't put IE6 on this list without mentioning one of the biggest single security holes in any web browser/Server technology.

Good to see that I'm not the only one who missed Netscape 6 (I was actually fanatical about Netscape up until then, but have never returned since) , Quicktime (which is as bad as realplayer) and all the horrible Norton products.

The Windows Millennium Edition.

I have used Win 95, 98, 98SE, 2000, ME and XP.
The worsest system i ever used is Win 2000, who take place on the left side. Next after that is Win XP, who came a little bit more into the center. The Millenium Edition, who is the system that are placed at the right, are the best system i ever used. Basically it is built on the 95/98 technology (right) and was placed more to the right than the previous system did.

The "problem" that make ME fall was that you need to understand it. I got ME on my five fingers so i have even succesfully repaired my ME when it was so badly treated that even a computer shop said "the only way you can go is to format your computer and re-install everything". When i went back to the shop after restore (i couldn't use system restore because it was so bad it wouldn't even start) they said:"we said that you needed to format it, because it was so badly treatened. Not that you couldn't restore it". I been so angry. That is those persons who had given the ME so bad rumour.

If Windows have released a new version (that i want them to do) they have surely make the best version ever, better than Vista (I've heard that the new Vista contains a function that track files that you have on your hard-drive and store it in a central database). For that is only needed to make a more easier version for non professional users, and a professional version for users that prefer control.

I've understand that companies prefer Win 2000 because it is a safety system. For office-working is it the best that ever been created, but you can't do much more than that. But i want flexibility. That have ME and i love it. XP is built on the NT/2000 system and contain parts from the 95/98/ME system.

The Millennium Edition seems to be an end of an era if Microsoft don't use the system to build a new OS that really is much better and contains the same flexibility that have make so many users chose the 95/98/ME Operative Systems. But i am still an user of ME. Anyway so long that i can.

AOL is a fine product. I've always been vague on why there is so much passionate dislike for the product. I've used it for a decade and have never run into a problem that wasn't easily resolved. I get zero spam and my legit mail always gets through.

The Windows system's flexibility:

-----------XP-------------|-------------------------
_________________-Comparisation-_________________
2000----------------------|-----------------------ME
-NT(later)-----------------|--------------------98---
---NT(earlier)-------------|-----------------95------

Left -----------------------|------------------- Right
Unflexible ------------------|---------------- Flexible

I have a hard time branding Internet Explorer 6 as one of the "Worst 25 Tech Products," a lot of people use it to great success, and a lot of people prefer it.

There are far worse tech products than Internet Explorer 6, like MusicMatch Jukebox or Norton Antivirus or McAfee Security Center or LimeWire or millions of other things...?

WHAT???? I was supposed to use that disc that said AOL on it INSIDE those beautiful boxes???? Dummy me..... I always tossed those disc and I still have some of the most beautiful boxes -- and many of those made great shipping boxes for Music CDs that I mailed to friends! hmmmm????? NOW YOU TELL ME!!!!!! I absolutely loved the comments. And what a trip down memory lane!!!!! I must admit that I had NEVER owned any of the LOOSERS.
and for the comment which includes the words
"sycophantic tripe"!!!!! Do you even know what that means????? --- attempting to win favor from influential people by flattery=sycophantic.
Tripe - Tripe is the muscular lining of cow stomach.
Hey - you may want to re-word your statement!!!!!

Good list overall, I agree with AOL as the worst ever. Between the joke-inducing quantities of worthless free-CDs and marketing tactics that resembled a cross between an agressive panhandler and a loanshark, they deserve it.

I'd like to have seen the FMV game (and the systems like Jaguar and 3DO that relied on them heavily) listed. In the age when archaic systems like the SNES were turning out classics of fun, interactive games with compelling storylines (the Final Fantasy series, Earthbound, Utopia, the SNES Sim City ports, and so on) they expected you to shell out $300 for a system (which isn't high now, but then it was 3 times what a slightly older system cost) to play glorified choose-your-own-adventure games with only cursory interactivity and horrid acting.

I know I'll be crucified for saying this, but I think some of the early MP3 players deserve the list too. Overpriced, suffering from real reliability issues, small memories, and vastly superior performance to even the then-aging Minidisk format...

All in all, a solid list, but I've seen a few real clunkers myself...

first of all, AMD K6 chip. I know it put AMD in the serious running with Intel for chip-market dominance, but it wasn't that good. It had heat issues, at least one friend had one literally burn up in the socket, and it had unfortunate clocking issues on occasion. I love my Athlon, and when 64-bit becomes more standard I'm sure I'll love it even more, but they've come a LONG way since the early chips.

And to be fair, the early MMX pentiums. With their floating-point conversion error, it was a public relations disaster, sure it might not have hurt a lot of users as much as they thought, but the idea that your chip is defective and the company wants you to PROVE you need it to be as accurate as they said it would be before they replace it (until they relented at least) was frustrating at the least. Add to that the fact that if those computers had been used for a calculation that WAS vital (say, for the notoriously lethal-bug ridden radiation-dose calculations) they might have really hurt someone.

Had a great time reading all these comments, but incredibly no one has mentioned Microsoft's e-book reader or the RocketBook. Maybe because only five people bought one? Here's one for next year: Sony's ebook reader -- so stupid the thing doesn't play audio. What are they thinking?

Compuserve had a feeble "AOL Killer" called WOW in the early/mid 90's. It featured multiple mailboxes and very poor response time. The whole thing folded in less then a year. Result? Compuserve owned by AOL......

19,200 Baud modems, I got one around 93 and it cost me $600.... I connected one time at the 19,200 rate which was very soon overtaken by "56k" modems that never hit 56k ......

IBM had a nasty token ring connector standard that had weak plastic cube connections that broke very easily under peoples desk... result I spent a long time on my hands and knees....

This one is probably too obsure but did anyone try Workperfect for the IBM AS/400 ? Works ported program ever...!

Linux, should be No1. It sucks.
Nerdy, geeky OS, that takes computing back to the 80's of dark age OSes.
Stick it on a computer, stick the computer in a office room, somewhere, and leave it there, NOT on a home PC.

Quicktime - THE worst codec on planet earth. Apple need shooting, for releasing such a pathetic attempt at a codec.

Apple - The whole Apple brand is purchased by Mercedes owning plebs, with more money than sense. People, or idiots, who take style over substance, and forget about money and cost. Plebs.
The whole Apple brand just screams rich spoiled brat student, or rich-pleb-silver-suit-wearing yuppy moron.

I purchased a Sony Viao laptop last year. It was more expensive than other comparable computers but I was willing to go the extra money because of Sony workmanship which they promote.

After three months the speaker plug shorted out, after one year the hard drive went bad and they charge $300 min. for a replacement even though a comparable drive sells for $80 retail.

If we start the list now, Sony would be No. 1.

Anyone ever messed with ARCserve? What a piece of crap. As an admin, I hated to tell a user that uh, that file you "accidently" deleted is unable to be recovered because of ARCserve screwing up.

And, Lotus Notes-could they possibly make it harder to work? Thank God no one uses it except the folks in government.

To be honest, many of the things listed in this thread that weren't in the list also deserve to be on the "worst ever" list. But can we forget the 3.5" floppy and its drives? Or maybe its 120 MB counterpart that mysteriously disappeared a few years after its release?
3.5" floppies are still the major small-data transfer medium; though it's ridiculously fragile and hopelessly undersized, the other small-data (i.e. less than 250 MB) storage/transfer media have proven to be if not slower, then definitely inferior. But we will all agree that if we needed to transfer documents to a non-network computer, the CD-RW (though it has a limited number of uses) is far easier to use and more durable than the 3.5" floppy.
Oh, and a CD drive will not eat up a disproportionate amount of processing power and speed while trying to manipulate/copy/paste/move data.

How about MLB.TV This service sucks! At 14.99 per month, games are subject to blackouts. Archived games stop playing, and need to be restarted, and watching live games will make your head explode with the video starting, stopping, freezing, and locking up. Horrible customer service!!

Are you guys totally insane? How could you leave out Lotus Notes?

It deserves to be #1 on that list!

I'll give you this: The CueCat was a terrible product. The ultimate in laziness. Also, Microsoft BOB was a laugh riot. My dad told me about that whole debacle and I thought "That's too stupid to be true." Shows what I know.
As for gaming tech, what about the ubiquitous Nintendo Power Glove or the Gamecube Network Adapter which only works for net-capable games...of which there are LESS THAN FIVE!?!

HIROSHIMA 45, CHERNOBIL 86, WINDOWS 95, WINDOWS 98, WINDOWS 2000

AOL and Microsoft neck & neck, for sure.

AOL for buying out CompuServe then immediately stopping worldwide service, cutting me off unless I wanted to dial up internationally. Morons!

Microsoft, a marketing company (not a high-tech company) for caring more about easy margins than quality since Day 1; stunting the industry for years.

Dishonorable mention: "hand" scanners at $600 which were universally unusable for anything.

Thanks for this amusing piece, it made my day.

Internet Explorer 6 is the best advertisement for Mozilla Firefox that I know of.
I still use Firefox today and hope to never go back to any Microsoft Internet Excrement product.

Oh, COME ON! Macromedia Flash! You can't list RealPlayer and complain about its constant update nags and then let Flash off the hook. And how about the hidden security settings features that no one knows about that allow you to disable websites from accessing your computer's webcam and microphone--features which are ENABLED by default. Don't believe me? Do a search for "flash security settings". Then wonder why they never bothered to mention it when you downloaded this POS.

FROM THIS DAY FORWARD, I ABSOLUTELY REFUSE TO EVER UPDATE FLASH AGAIN! Come on, say it with me: "FROM THIS DAY FORWARD, I ABSOLUTELY REFUSE TO EVER UPDATE FLASH AGAIN!"

It's interesting that the same author put both the Zip drive in the 25 worst, and 50 greatest tech products. So which is it to be Dan Tynan? you can't think something is the best and then think it is also the worst? make up your mind

Good lord, what a response list. As for the (not so) Real Player, you forget, there are a lot of alternatives. The first that comes to mind, even predates RP, and that's Good Old Winamp. They are now sadly affiliated with AOL, but in a limited way, And at least that gives us FREE XM radio to our desktops. Around longer than Itunes, and certainly more capable, it offers FREE access to tons of tunes (most the same), and videos. In fact itunes modeled much of what it does after its older brother. Don't forget the CORE media player, which now even has iterations for Smartphones (PalmOS and PPC), as TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player). The list goes on, but those two have tons of addons and plugins to make them compatible with just about anything. Still missing something? There is Media Player Classic (looks like media player 6), and, with the proper plugins, can wedge itself as a *replacement* for RealPlayer AND QuickTime, fooling the system into thinking they are really installed, but it plays instead!

And while it's biting the hand that feeds us, Microsoft Windows has to be a great yet deplorable product, so even in both lists. Of course, if they DID fix it like it's supposed to be, there'd be more people out of work than cancer researchers...

To disagree with earlier opinions, Windows 2000 has to be the most stable OS that Microsoft has released. I'd say Win95B, but I can't call Win95 an OS, as it is really a GUI. In use today, 2000 has been hacked and tweaked to the nth degree for use in the X-Boxes, because it's still small, MUCH smaller than XP, and far more stable as a result. And fast. Simple is best. But, in this day and age, function follows form, no?

This may be a very limited gripe, but the original version 1.0 of the game Sin was truly, truly awful. Whoever let this thing out in general release ought to have been forced to play their junk, for several horrible hours!

The key issue was that performance of the game on mid-level hardware of the day was atrocious. The frame rates were so bad that it was like freeze-framing your way through a movie. It was unplayable, unwatchable, and unfun.

The vendor eventually issued a "patch". The "patch" was really a complete game replacement, literally a forklift rip and replace.

No E-Machines?

Thanks for the walk down memory lane (no pun intended). Being older than I would like to admit, I lived through too many of those "wonders".

I laughed myself to tears. Now I know how my dad feels when he reminisces about the Model T!

Oh, you forgot to give the address and phone numbers for product refunds.

I guess if a "music" CD is considered a tech product, then you forgot any CD from Britney Spears. Her greatest hits CD is a major insult to the music industry greats and certainly a sad moment of mediocrity for the listening world.

Thank you so much for putting AOL at the top of your list. I have long loathed the "internet for stupid people" company and I consider their advertising ("aol keyword _____") insulting to people's intelligence. It's amazing how many customers they have believing that if they didn't exist, no one would ever know where to go on online.

This article was GREAT!
AOL was with out a doubt #1. Musicmatch, I think will soon be joining this list.
As to the rest. I did agree with most of it, but on the positive side, if we did not have most of these flops, we would not have had something to fix and really make better. The rest of the flops just made more landfill.
Keep up the good writing!

Ah the joys of ME. I think I saw more BSOD than webpages when running that thing. I remember when I finally gave up on it and started backing things up for a wholesale format, my brother on his way out the door refused to let me format it while he was gone because, and I quote, "I want to watch it die". On his return, he then proceeded to watch the entire formatting run (on a 55 GB hard drive), gleefully calling out the percent completion every few minutes. Seriously thought he was going to need a cigarette after all that.

Got burned by AOL once, but with a few caustic remarks - along the lines of "I installed it and stopped using it 5 seconds later. Why do I owe you money?" - my father managed to get rid of it in a hurry and I do believe without paying them anything.

A lot of the other stuff was very giggle worthy though I don't have firsthand experience for the most part. Thanks for the fun!

Lest we forget the Outlook before Outlook and the InfoSelect before InfoSelect: PackRat. The last version ever released must have spent a week in Alpha and a weekend in Beta and it literally put the company out of business.

What about pop-up advertising? On the very first page of your already ad laden article, I get a annoying pop-up blocking my view. To me, pop-up advertisements are number one in bad tech, at least from a consumer standpoint.

I'm a big Apple fan but in the early 90's they released a PowerMac 6100 model that included an intel 486 processor daughter card for running Windows 3.11. You could, theoretically, switch between the Mac OS and Windows with a key combination. Never could get the three that my school bought to work reliably. Glad those days are over. Long live Bootcamp!

On a different note, I think I'm the only human on Earth, ('cept for Steve Jobs maybe?) that actaully liked the "Hockey Puck" mouse from the original iMacs.

I'm a big Apple fan but in the early 90's they released a PowerMac 6100 model that included an intel 486 processor daughter card for running Windows 3.11. You could, theoretically, switch between the Mac OS and Windows with a key combination. Never could get the three that my school bought to work reliably. Glad those days are over. Long live Bootcamp!

On a different note, I think I'm the only human on Earth, ('cept for Steve Jobs maybe?) that actaully liked the "Hockey Puck" mouse from the original iMacs.

I'm a big Apple fan but in the early 90's they released a PowerMac 6100 model that included an intel 486 processor daughter card for running Windows 3.11. You could, theoretically, switch between the Mac OS and Windows with a key combination. Never could get the three that my school bought to work reliably. Glad those days are over. Long live Bootcamp!

On a different note, I think I'm the only human on Earth, ('cept for Steve Jobs maybe?) that actaully liked the "Hockey Puck" mouse from the original iMacs.

One might give AOL credit for getting people started, sort of like training wheels. From that viewoint, maybe some of their current problems are due to the training wheels having done their job. People can now give them up.

It was fun to read, but the title should have been Worst 25 Computer Tech Products. If you want the worst tech products, you should look at products like the two-door Chevrolet Blazer, with the highest overal driver death rate (308 per million) and highest rollover death rate (251 per million). The average for 199 models studied by the Insurance Institute during 2000-2003 was 87 per million. The next most deadly cars had rates of 209, 205, 200 and 197. So the Blazer really stands out as a "DeathStar". Remember, if your disk drive crashes, you lose some data (so back up!!!). If your Blazer crashes, YOU DIE!!!

Epson printers, Epson printers, Epson printers,
i have 3 of then, with all 3 i must print something at least twice a week, if not, what a strange noices for at least 3 or 4 minutes.
I was fool 2 times, the first not count.

Windows ME was not really Windows Mistake Edition. It was more like Windows "MUGS" Edition. How do I know? I tried it for two days and wasted $100 buying it in the first place, Mind you the CD makes a great coaster for coffee cups, beer cans etc.

Priceline Groceries was GREAT! I bought groceries every week and saved TONS. I couldn't believe that it stayed around as long as it did simply because I saved so much money on my grocery bill! Have to disagree with #11. Otherwise, good list!

SoftRAM was worse than described. It came with a utility that showed you just how much RAM you were saving with their proprietary RAM compressor installed (which was actually just Microsoft's EMM386.EXE DOS memory manager with a few slight changes). Sure enough, it showed you in colorful graphs just how much memory you were saving.

Except, uh, it somehow showed the VERY SAME SAVINGS even if you did NOT have their memory manger installed! OOOOPS!

Hurricane by Helix Software was a product that actually WORKED. It did do some RAM compression, but its main ability was to effectively give each program running under Win 9# its own GDI and User Heaps (what Windows (# calls "System Resources"). These were areas of memory that HAD to be in the first 640kB of RAM, that contained "handles" (pointers to pointers) to memory structures in higher RAM. The GDI Heap created such a handle for every user interface element running in Windows or any Windows app. Each and every window, each and every widget in a window (including buttons, menus, menu items, scroll bars, etc.) required a GDI handle. Each handle used four bytes, and that added up quickly. The heaps were only 64kB each, and could not be expanded. This was why, no matter how much RAM you added to Windows 9#, you could only run so many programs at a time.

Hurricane solved this by effectively giving each Windows program its own heaps, and moving the ones of programs not currently running into Extended RAM. They'd be moved back into <640kB RAM when the program became active again.

Great article. i really got a kick out of it. By the way, for you people suffering and complaining about popups, ads, and IE. Heres the solution to your problems: Mozilla Firefox. Not only is it great to start out with, but has extentions, such as ad blocker, that are simple and painless to add which make it even better than you could imagine. i might be exaggerating, but compared to IE and others i might not be. Anyway i saw way to many complaints about ads and popups so i had to say something. I havent got a popup or an ad in forever.

Probably IBM-Hitachi Deskstar 's little brother Travelstar 100GB (HTS541010G9AT00) is also a terrible product. I'm a techinician and I have change more that 200 disks. The all die with the same way and without any change to recover the data.

Probably IBM-Hitachi Deskstar 's little brother Travelstar 100GB (HTS541010G9AT00) is also a terrible product. I'm a technician and I have replace more that 200 disks. The all die with the same way and without any change to recover the data.

Need to slide the list down a bit and add "Dan Tynan" as #1 for writing this extremely biased, and in some cases flat out lying article

I guess I was one of the fortunate ones. I used to have Windows ME installed on my own computer and have installed it on several other computers without any problems what-so-ever. The whole O.S. worked flawlessly for me, as well. Always did and always will have a dislike for anything Apple/Macintosh, Dell, Realnetworks, WebT.V. (What a joke), Gateway and several other products from the past and present. Guess I should be thankful for not being one of the people to whine and complain about Microsoft in general as well. Thanks to their software I have had several years of happy computing and expect to have several more.

Thank you PC World, Steve Bass, and the rest. A daunting task, yes, and your list is excellent.

Better yet, the reader's replies!! Best reading experience since John leCarre!!

I sent this article to all my AOL users....They always thought I was exaggerating my disdain!

You should publish this in a book....O'Reilly?

Me in CT

How many of these products did you hype PC World?

I'd like to add a stinker to the list: the Monorail PC from the mid-1990s. This all-in-one unit came with everything...including a software testing bug that the programmers put in but forgot to take out before shipping. As a result, just about every Monorail made had code within it that would render it useless within days or weeks. Talk about derailing!

In the late 1980's Tandy (Radio Shack) came out with a portable model of their TRS80 computer. It was like carrying a portable sewing machine in size and weight! Of course I had to have one. I am an accountant and at that time wowed my clients by showing up with this great technology. After a couple of trips it was retired to the desktop!

Sega 32X stole so many kids allowances

SPOT watch technology seems like a failure.

A friend of mine uses AOL because he gets it for $3 a month through his employer. Even though he has Comcast cable TV coming into his house, and therefore Comcast cable broadband is a phone call away.

Every time I go over to help him with some computer problem, I get so frustrated with AOL screwing up or holding up things I want to explode.

I offer ask him why don't you get cable? He says, "We're don't use the internet that much anyway." And I tell him, "HELL, I WOULDN'T EITHER IF I HAD AOL!!!!!!!!!"

Yes! AOL should be categorized as organized crime. I am preparing a court action to recover the near-$6,000.00 in overcharges that occured to my account over several years (the monthly statement was mailed to someone other than myself while i was the sole user) Even though the billing department acknowledges the overcharges, their representatives can only offer 2 months free service to make up for this. ALSO - beware of VIDEO PROFESSOR'S "free" teaching CD's. After they have your credit card number to pay for the $4.95 "shipping and handling" you will be receiving regular multiple CD packages in the mail and your bank account will have several charges monthly (I was robbed of almost $300.00 quickly). Getting a refund would never happen so I opened the packages and tried the "easiest way to learn anything on the computer." The lessons, at some point, suggested an action that wasn't an option, leaving the product useless and John Scherer wealthy. OTHER THIEVES: MusicMatch and MSN.

Yes! AOL should be categorized as organized crime. I am preparing a court action to recover the near-$6,000.00 in overcharges that occured to my account over several years (the monthly statement was mailed to someone other than myself while i was the sole user) Even though the billing department acknowledges the overcharges, their representatives can only offer 2 months free service to make up for this. ALSO - beware of VIDEO PROFESSOR'S "free" teaching CD's. After they have your credit card number to pay for the $4.95 "shipping and handling" you will be receiving regular multiple CD packages in the mail and your bank account will have several charges monthly (I was robbed of almost $300.00 quickly). Getting a refund would never happen so I opened the packages and tried the "easiest way to learn anything on the computer." The lessons, at some point, suggested an action that wasn't an option, leaving the product useless and John Scherer wealthy. OTHER THIEVES: MusicMatch and MSN.

I bought a modified Cue Cat from EBAY and use it to scan DVD's into DVD Pro... Works great! You can also use it in Word and Excell and other programs.

What, no Quicktime or Incredimail?

My parents had just bought a new laptop and used one of those AOL 60 day trial CD's. When the 60 trial ran out, the charged them roughly 25 bucks every two weeks. That's 50 bucks a month for crappy dial up internet! I myself didn't find it very user friendly and it had way too many ads! AOL has definitely earned its spot at #1 on this list!

I must be the only one on the planet that NEVER, EVER had a problem with Win ME! Maybe it was the tweaks to the registery I made following PC World recomendations for WIN 95. I never saw some of these regarding 98SE.

What?!?
No Mac G4 Cube?!?

Ah, for games you forgot the games for D&D which had some of the biggest fiascos.

Pool of Radiance 2 had a bug in it that if you uninstalled the program, occasionally it would go ahead and not only uninstall the program...but the Windows OS along with it!!!

And since they didn't learn from that mistake, when they created Neverwinter Nights, in the original release, it had a similar bug (but striking a lot fewer people) which basically could do the same thing to the unwary!!!!

You also forgot the fiasco that was bigger than WinME that caused several companies to abandon Microsoft OS's and caused entire nations to switch to alternate OS's.

Windows XP with their authentication (which the pirates had hacked within hours of it's release, causing them no problems or anyone who wanted to pirate it no problems) causing thousands (or the millions that got WinXP it should be mentioned, so a small percentage) to have countless problems, with the end result that XP hijacks someone's computer and files if they can't figure out how to register it within 30 days (the poor old grandmas).

But that wasn't all...every week or so a new security breach occurred...DUE at first to the VERY ways that MS had created to access your system themselves!!!

I'd say those were some pretty big blunders...

Re AOL. All you folks have NO idea of how badly it really stinks! Come and join them in here France. First, you have a recording telling you - in French only - that you are limited to 30 minutes. After a long wait, say, 15 minutes, If you have only English software in your machine, their reps say they "don't speak English" and refer you to Bangladore, which is usually speaking English with an incomprehensible accent, or they don't know how in hell to solve your problem, so they ask you to hold for a "minute or two" while they consult with the guy looking over their shoulder with the 'book of knowledge'. Meanwhile, they leave their mike open and the noise of girls laughing and screaming in the BG is too much.

Finally, the French office has hours from 10AM to 1pm and 4PM to 7PM - a 7-hour day and to HELL with the customer!

real player is one, but not as annoying as Quicktime, to me. once i download it, it messes up my firefox browser (it keeps saying i hav missing plugins, even i've set windows media as a default player...) i uninstalled QT, forget it, it still wouldn't play any type of media unless i reinstall it. i guess the only way out is the reformat my C: drive... (ERRRRRRR!!!)

the program itself is good, but it's really the pain in the @$$ of the other things it does to the browser.

I have subscribed to AOL since 1993, I never had the problems that you described.
Back then and until now, I could always access the internet, never had a problem with phone support, do not remember to many ads.
Every one gets spam. All the others have ads in their mail, but not AOL.
AOL now supplies free anti-virus and anti-spyware and a firewall that works. Accept for ad-ware I only use AOL's. They also have a free computer diagnostic program, which is the best that I have used.
PC World supplies none of these services on line. Nor does any of the on-line services.
Back in the early 90's very few people were on-line. Less than 1% of the population. Thanks to AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve and "in your face advertising" made the internet available to everybody. Encouraged its use to the many non-users.
Yes on rare instances, AOL had problems, but not very often, and only for a few moments at the most. I can live with that.
Your "bad mouthing" story does not even suggest a better service, why?
I say a thanks to them, for all they did for us.

I have to say I think Windows ME works just
fine and I still use it for my primary OS. In fact,
I just added XP as a dual boot only because
some software is not listing ME as an operating
system. Blue screens, a few. But insignificant
considering Win95 and Win98! System Restore.
Just don't use it, period. ME is good, but it is
now becoming outdated and I shudder to think
I will have to use something more complex and
unfriendly. I wish Microsoft would embrace the
KISS standard when they create.

Gold, silver, and bronze all go to Microsoft Windows in all of it?s forms. The only virus people upgrade. It was forced on you if you wanted to use a PC. It failed miserably in the promise of multi tasking unless you saved every keystroke due to the pending crash and re-boot. Used OS/2 behind the scenes in NT (look in the directory tree of your ..\Windows\System32 tree even as late as Windows 2000) and never gave the credit due. Delivered tens of thousands of viruses because of the lousy, so called, operating system software delivered. Never corrected any thing that was broken, just built a workaround which usually broke something else. Delivered tens of thousands of fixes, service packs, and patches and built functionality to deliver them when it became humanly impossible to keep up. Crushed competition and innovation and then years later bragged that they were delivering something new, voice recognition and long file names come to mind. Fined the company and made them pay a few million dollars which is chump change and money they stole in the first place using monopolistic business practices. But business practices for AOL, that made number one in your list.

Let's see.... choose one... old days of text based internet 1200baud high speed dial-up... 2 competing services... America Online or Compuserve.... I chose Compuserve.... wonder what ever happened to them..... oh well... AOL won the numbers by those who never advanced their savy... and nothing's changed.... AOL deserves #1 FOREVER!

#21 (eyetop DVD player) was not entirely without merit. Before I retired from Civil Service I heard the Navy was playing with just such a device. Mechanics would wear it while doing maintenance on Naval aircraft. The mechanic could select the portion of the DVD dealing with the equipment he was repairing/replacing to get step-by-step instructions so that no mistakes were made. I don't know if it was ever put into service, but is seemed like a good idea.

Even words then the IOmega Zip was the IOmega Jaz. Much more expensive and much more unreliable. Bye, bye money and bye, bye data!

Coool! One of the most fun articles I have read here, and I have been a PC World fan for years. Keep up the good work.
I had even tried a couple of the above items myself. Nice to know I was not the only one who got "screwed".
Of course many of us are still struggling along with our favorite OS to love/hate, Win-doze.
You should plan on doing this article every couple years. Sort of like the much anticipated "worst dressed" lists of Hollywood folks.

You correctly listed the Real Player, but you forgot to mention its ideal replacement: Real Alternative, a freeware program that does what Real Player ought to have done. It plays the Real Player formats and does not try to take over at all.

Norton/Symantec is Something which should have been HIGH on the list ! ! As if you bought the BIG package it decided to take over your computer and almost run the computer for you and if it crashed
hahaha I have had to remove Nortons stuff from so
many computers its not funny . . So when I see Nortons on a computer I inform them of their impending problem and ask them if they want it removed and ususlly they will say yes and Install AVG for anti virus for them . .

AS A NOVIS P/C BUFF, LOOKING BACK ON SOME OF THESE PRODUCTS, I FIND MYSELF ASHAMED THAT AFTER, WORKING FOR THIRTY YEARS AS AN AUTO TECH, ON DIAGNOSTICS, OF ELECTRICAL, AND COMPUTER SYSTEMS, UNDER THE HOOD, OF SOME FINE CARS, THAT I WAS HOODWINKED, BY THESE HI-TECH PIRATES, PLAYING ALL OF US...AND AT A COST, THAT WILL TAKE A FEW MORE YEARS TO REALIZE THE EXTENT, AND THE DAMAGE!!! FEELIN, FOOLISH...

I just subscribed to PC World. Along with the free gift I received for subscribing, I received an AOL CD. "Try AOL 90 days risk-free!" Does PC World's sales/subscription staff not read their own magazine?

what, no Colecovision Adam and TurboGrafx-16?

WOW, you made my day ? I only had a few of those clunkers.
You should have a routine product clunker review on a quarterly basis.

I REALLY LIKED YOUR WORST 25.I HAVE A SMALL COMPUTER SHOP AND I HAVE BEEN TELL PEOPLE " DONT USE AOL " NOW I CAN SHOW THEM SOMETHING ON PAPER. I LIKE YPUR MAG.AND THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT.

Anybody else out there been scammed by INkline Global TVolution. Kind of a make-believe version of a personal video recorder. Outright theft, partiularly since after months of trying, I could not get them to refund my $29.95 per their "risk free" 60 day money back guarantee.

Norton AntiVirus Must be No. 1; High memory; and if it faults just format unless you have a couple of weeks spare!
Win ME, some people actually like this OS, it's very disturbing for a tech to re-install this you know.
Messenger, kill kill kill and still kill before it's gone
Protected Games, why do I have to spend so much time to fix these things.
Here's a really good one Rapidshare, you either love the ip monitoring software, or hate it, like me

I once had AOL. Service was a nightmare.
At one point in particular, when I was "upgrading" to AOL's latest version and experienced difficulty, I was told by AOL tech support to get another AOL disc at the Post Office because those discs were less apt to have download issues. I went to SBC DSL. No more problems.

I would have to mention OrangeMicro. After selling thousands of cool iBot webcams, the company disappeared off the face of the earth. There are no drivers available anywhere; their products had to be dumped in the trash.

I am almost 85 and only started computing 10 years ago, and have been pleased with all versions of AOL, No major problems, no shutdowns, few calls for support, etc. Would not change for anything. I also have my second TIMEX DATA LINK Watch. Love it!! Too many people are reading PC World when they should be reading the real bible--Smart Computing!

While I might quarrel a bit with the order of your picks, I think you folks really nailed it in your selections! Great job!

I definitly agree with AOL as #1. I had it and whenever it went over 6kbps I would be soooo happy; it was really that slow, 6kbps...

There goes the digiterati again. Blaming AOL for all the woes of the world (if not MS). The real reason AOL is number one on the list is that these snobs are angry that they allowed millions of normal people onto the internet. I mean really, how dare they make an easy interface that was intuitive to a normal user and not force the user to deal with terms they have never heard of at the time: http, ftp, tcp/ip. They actually allowed users to connect if they did not get an engineering degree from a major University.

Most all of the technical issues listed were temporary growing pains at a time mass internet connections were new. Bad connections led to better servers and upgrades to modems to support PPP. Servers were constantly added. AOL supported huge numbers of call representatives to keep customer service as high as possible for all the calls it had at its hight. Customer service was not great, but compared to other ISPs at the time, it was far better than most

Fact is, AOL has struggled because the realities of the market changed. Most of their customers were pretty loyal, but it is difficult to justify paying for AOL on top of Broad band. The isps give way to telecoms and cable companies.

Obviously millions of AOLers actually liked AOL and it stays alive because of its qualities, not despite them.

What may make the PC Jr. even worse was when it was obvious that general public wasn't going to bite on these bricks, IBM in an obvious move to GET RID of thousands of these machines packaged them with equally awful software product called "Writing to Read" and foisted them on our nation's schools! I can testify that teachers and students alike hated the software (when the the PC Jr. was working right in the first place) and represented thousands if not millions more of wasted public dollars.

My god. The puck mouse... I believe my brain intentionally erased all painful memories associated with using it. And now those distraught moments seep into my conciousness like poison sludge.

And to be fair; regulation hockey pucks were bigger, and probably more ergonomic than this atrocity.

GAETWAY SUCKS @$$, i just got one and i paid $1,500 for it, amd i have had to replace just about every d*mn part in in. Their tech support sucks, and they can't get anything right. At least their tech support stations are either in Canada or US. Either way, I STILL HATE THEM, once the friken warranty runs out, i am going to show it a little respect and put my shoe through it, if i have another problem with it, there is going to be a gateway into my trash can for it.

can anyone give me a "hell yeah" and add a compaq to that description

What about ms-dos 4.0??

Oddly enough, I was more interested in reading this story than the one on 50 greatest gadgets. Wonder if that's the case with others too!!
Great story though!

Why I can't see Microsoft FoxPro in this list?
Yhis database is really bad, and same code can be executed in different ways, can cause different results!
Even Microsoft Access is better than Fox Pro!

virtuaboy

Not even a mention anywhere of IBM's Microchannel Architecture (MCA)? That mistake of a proprietary bus drove them out of the IBM PC compatible business, paving the way for Dell and Gateway during the late 80's/early 90's.

The Apple Lisa comes to mind as well, though I suppose we never really knew if it was a bad machine because it simply washed away in the Macintosh tide. There were stories about thousands of brand new Lisas going to landfill a year after the release. Wonder if those stories were true. Too bad Apple didn't landfill all those wretched hockey pucks.

In addition to what I wrote earlier, I will quote from another persons comment:
"Posted by Amanda on Friday, May 26, 2006, 07:40 PM (PST)"
"I never had any problems with AOL. The only thing that was odd was they sent a letter to me saying they were no longer offering Broadband/DSL when we had it, so we switched over to SBC DSL, but I still here AOL offering Broadband/DSL to this day. What the heck? Oh well. I'm glad we switched."
Yes it was odd, I got a letter like that one, but it was not from AOL, I checked with them and they never sent it. It was a spoof letter to get people to switch from AOL to another provider. In Amanda's case they succeeded.
I bet the author of this "article" fell for it also.

Does anyone remember the complete disaster that was known as the PalmPilot VII?
- Expensive online access
- A fixed set of user interfaces to online data (updates had to be downloaded to a PC and synced)
- A form factor that was just a little too large (and flimsy) for true "pocket" use.
I have always regretted buying that piece of crud. Still have it...just discovered the box complete with the unit and all docs/accessories in the garage last weekend.

How about any video chip or driver by S3? The S3 Trio64 and Virge were nicknamed "graphics decelerators" because they rendered graphics slower than the CPU could. And at the time, ATI's drivers were on par with S3's.

As mentioned, IBM's MWAVE sound card/modem combos caused numerous suicides. If a machine needed an OS reinstall and you saw it had an MWAVE in it, you either ran screaming into the night or left a human shaped hole in the wall like in the cartoons. Most of the time, I would just rip them out and replace them with a separate sound card and modem rather than wasting a few good hours trying to get them to work.

Early Windows plug and pray. IRQ conflicts and COM port fiascos were also a nightmare of tech-past. These issues usually surfaced with an ISA modem that refused to accept a certain COM port or its respective IRQ. This situation was made worse when you threw in a Creative SoundBlaster/16 card that started grabbing IRQs and DMAs even though you hacked autoexec.bat's set blaster= line. Throw in unmarked jumper settings on these early cards and the Sound Blaster/ISA modem combination could be lethal (see MWAVE). Plug and play, my arse.

Early DirectX versions were also a disaster and would often blow up a machine when it haphazardly replaced the video or sound driver with an incompatible one.

Mirrored AT motherboard power connectors that could be easily reversed and fry the board. Black wires together! Black wires together!

Highpoint RAID on the ABIT BP-6 that was broken out of the box and lacked any method to disable it.

Microsoft Access. After using Lotus Approach, Access seems as user-friendly as assembly language.

How about the demise of the excellent Mac clones and CHRP (Common hardware reference platform) when Job's withheld the Mac ASIC (application specific integrated circuit). He saw the huge margins Apple made on hardware and withheld the ASIC to kill the clones and make Apple's hardware proprietary once again. As far as Apple went, that was the last straw for me.

I'm surprised no one mentioned the entire tech industries' reliance on dubious mail-in rebate pricing. I think in all my years of tech, this has burned me more than all the AOL fiascos combined.

Finally, as much as I hate AOL they do have a place. Their age level filtering is excellent for households with younger kids and if you use select Linksys routers (such as the BEFSR41) you can lock down a broadband connection so that all internet connections must go through AOL logons with their requisite filtering levels.

Although I generally agree to your list, I do feel that
it gives Microsoft too much credit.
It should be ME on top, that's right, but than the others so called user-friendly systems like 98 2000 and XP should follow closely. Than leave at least 200 places blank before AOL and the others come next.

A DOS (Disk operating system) should be just that and nothing more. We don't need all the additoinal crap!

I did not see anyone mention the one from back in time: The Texas Instruments TI-994A. A graphics incapable computer.

Sonic cineplayer DVD rom software should
be right up there with the rest of the losers.
Also Windows media layer in my opinion .
I enjoy these kind of articles.

I think the rankings are a bit out of whack. As a proud owner of an IBM "Deathstar" drive, I can say that it negatively affected me more than the minor annoyance that the Comet Cursor could have (rankings of 16 and 18, respectively).

I like the one on webtv because some high-priced hotels/motels carry this product which to me is a rip-off! Why? because it is expensive to use and the screen quality sucks to cyber-heaven! But we all gotta learn sometimes, right?

Claria? Gator? weatherbug? hello? SPYWARE?!? come on how many computer did they infect crash and kill your computer? the senate was considering laws against them that's how bad they are...and they don't make this list? LAME.

Couldn't agree more with some of your selections, however I think that if CometCursor is in there (I remember it as a real pain in the**), so should be Gator . What a nuisance. And if AOL is because of their totally inadequate software, so should be the early versions of Mc Afee antivirus products - nearly as impossible to get the remnants off your system as AOl. Turned me into an involuntary registry expert. And for upcoming lists of the worst stuff around, please do mention

Internet Explorer 6 is on the list? You're going to throw that in even though all the problems stem from hackers not from the software itself?

There's software that by design installs tons and tons of spyware on your machine and it didn't even get a mention (ie. Kazaa).

IE6 is not NEARLY as bad as the article made it seem.

The RCA Video Disk (mid 1980s) ranks well up there on this list. Talk about timing - a needle-based video playback system introduced AFTER CDs and soon eclipsed by laser disks and, ultimately (years later), DVDs.

Re AOL: techies hate it..not complicated and flukie enough..Users love it..reliable, straightforward, trouble free. Techies and pseudo tech "experts", go back to your crystal meth..

Not sure anybody will read down this far, but I just wanted to say that I was a recipient of the Compaq distributed by Free-PC.com. Instructions were VERY easy to find online to tell how to disable the on-screen ads. When the company went bust, they sent us instructions to remove the ads ourselves, because it wouldn't have been cost-effective to pay us to send them back. I still have mine and it still works, though it's not my primary PC.

Some people are standing up for AOL.

The defenses include things like:

1) "Millions of people would not be online now if it wasn't for AOL"

2) "Techies hate it..not complicated and flukie enough..Users love it..reliable, straightforward, trouble free"

3) "It gave people the internet at a time when other options were bleak."

Each of these are so obviously false that they could only be written by AOL in an attempt to slightly dampen the bad press.

I once re-shingled my roof w/ AOL cd's

Wow, I have Windows ME, and AOL, and yup I agree, those can be pretty painful at times. On Windows ME, I would just let it run idle, and it would still go to a BSOD. On AOL, it would periodically just freeze, which I would then have to ctrl-alt-del, and end-task it. It seems to also have memory leaks and then some. I don't get why they can't fix this...

You really should have had Packerd Bell in there but Starforce "copy-protection" software has been proven to melt cd/dvd-rw's

As someone who works in an IT department and regularly gets help calls, I'd place Internet Explorer 6 much higher on that list, easily above Windows ME (though that certainly deserves a top ten slot), because there are people out there still using IE 6. I suppose all the spyware I have to help people remove from their system is Microsoft's way of giving me job security. So thanks, I guess, Microsoft.

Brilliant! I'm not at all surprised that AO-Hell leads the pack. You neglected to mention that with each "new and improved" version of AO-Hell it always takes more steps to complete any given task than it took in the previous version. AO-Hell's "anti-spyware" claims are not only so bogus that they're irritating, you'd be hard pressed to find any software that compromises your system more or puts more spyware on it than AO-Hell including, you guessed it, Real Player and Quicktime! Kazaa, Compaq notebooks, and proprietary "System Restore" disks that don't work all deserve special mention.

I had a "Toshitta" laptop that after 32 case numbers and an endless number of calls to India, Turkey, and Istanbul, 3 failed hard drives, 2 failed system boards, and 2 failed dvd-roms that, through a fluke, I was finally able to get Toshiba to take back. What did they give me in return? A "refurbished" piece of junk that was NOT "equal or better than" as they promised but actually had fewer features than the original, and with only a 90-day warranty (a representative called exactly 1 day before the warranty expired offering me an extension for another $300). After replacing 2 hard drives, 2 dvd-roms, 2 system boards, and a new keyboard on Toshiba's "replacement" laptop, the system board failed for a third time just 2 weeks after the warranty expired. It sat on a shelf at a Toshiba service center for over a year waiting for the cost of a replacement system board to fall below $600 (by that point about what the thing was worth).

What about Norton Systemjerks that dominates your entire computer and forces your hard drive to crash? Then after you've reinstalled Systemjerks too many times you're forced to make a toll call to Symantec to "reactivate" the product which promptly becomes obsolete 1-1/2 years after purchase, forcing you into an even more clunky "upgrade" costing more than what you not long before paid for the original software? Please add an Epson printer that lasted less than 1 year due to "underuse" (it became cheaper just to buy a new HP Printer rather than continuing to waste money on the Epson's 4 individually over-priced print cartridges). IE6, Windows ME, AOL and Paypal Phishing spoofs all do deserve a special place in hell, too. I bought an Averatec notebook last year but the hard drive failed in less than 2 weeks! I discovered that the only thing worse than a "System Restore" disk that doesn't work is a System Restore disk and Customer Service that don't exist. Fortunately, I was able to return it to Circuit City for a full refund less than a month after purchase...whew.

WGA in Win XP.

Great list, I would have liked to have seen Bonzi Buddy and Weather Bug on the list.

I had a serious problem with Windows 98 and paid for 'advice' from at least a dozen of Microsoft's techies to fix it. Virtually none of the proffered 'fixes' worked.

I finally asked for a supervisor and when she still couldn't find the problem, she offered me a free copy of Windows Millenium Edition.

I thought she was making a good-will gesture at the time. ARRRRRGGGGGGGH!

Real Player should have been at the top of the list.
I've been an AOL user for many, many years without much problem. My husband likes the financial information they provide.
As Amanda posted above, I received a letter that AOL was no longer providing DSL in my area and I needed to get other DSL service. I did, at a significantly lower cost, and continued with AOL at a reduced rate. AOL is still advertising DSL service here. Maybe they didn't like me.
AOL continued to bill my credit card for DSL after they terminated my service until I got my credit card company involved and very shortly had my refund. No other major problems with AOL.

Barb

There are too many responses to read and I can agree with a lot of them. Since browsing through some of the comments people have posted, I didn't see anybody comment on the LS-120 Floppy Drives being on the 25 Worst Tech products of all time.

For those who aren't familiar with this item or just plain forgotten, it was a floppy drive when used with the proper disc (I belive it was put out by Imation) could store up to 120MB of data compared to the normal floppy's storage of 1.44MB. Not to long after this came out the cd writer came out which put the first and last nail into the LS-120's coffin. The discs themselves which could only be purchased in 3-packs costed a fortune.

I wouldn?t put the Iomega Zip Drive (or for that matter the Jazz drive) on the list of the list of The 25 Worst Tech Products. Iomega was definitely having problems by 1999-2000. However, I would agree with getmeparu above that when the Iomega ZIP drive was introduced it was awesome. This was before CDs and DVDs were widely available and the option for large scale backup (tape systems) was difficult at best. When Iomega was at its peak, they produced great products that worked.

Even today, I am really surprised by the volume of CDs and DVDs that are burned on one system and completely unreadable on other PCs. Now that we will soon be looking at Terabyte drives, system backup will be a continuing problem. Are we really going to use 130 Dual Layer DVDs to back up our TB drives?

I'm 60 years old, and remember most of the "worst" ideas you've reviewed. Was it the Timex 2000 that got us all on board? What fun it's been, dodging the bullets, galloping toward that perfect machine! I want many more years of trying. (Yes, AOL still is a great backup access)

Where's Lisa? Also, does anybody remember Laser Discs? Vinyl Record-sized alternatives to VCRs that cost 60 bucks a pop. The worst thing... in the middle of the movie, you had to get up and turn the disc over. What a waste.

IBM PCjr. I agree that IBM misread its market in thinking that most buyers were early gamers. In fact students mainly bought them for schoolwork, myself included. However I ended up using it for 9 years and had no problems once I upgraded the memory (anyone remember racore add ons). Its graphics were years ahead of most other computers and the few games for the game slots were also ahead of its peers. I only replaced it when advances in tech meant newer programs would no longer work. Of the 4 computers I have owned the Jr was the most reliable. I never saw the blue screen of death or anything else.

Habadex - The first program available for the 1984 Mac after the bundled MacWrite and MacPaint. It was sooo bad that after a store demo I walked away from it, even after being reminded that it was the only other program for Mac. Not to rest on their laurels, Haba switched to hardware and released Double sided Double density external floppy disc drive.
One of the Mac stores in San Diego ordered 12 units. On arrival 10 were pre broken, the other 2 failed within 1 hour.

I was also a lucky recipient of a Free Compaq Presario Desktop distributed by Free-PC.com. back in 99... It was actually a decent machine back then as Meredith mentioned above. It came with a pair of JBL speakers and a 15" CRT Monitor (ALL For FREE) - It was my first PC... So I can't complain.
My mistake was to load AOL on it. I learned quickly that AOL was a virus in itself. I jumped the AOL ship and swam over to MSN, never looking back... For all You Gun Ho AOL Diehards? You are a product of the feed animal syndrome that one poster mentioned early on. You just don?t know any better.

Don't forget SyQuest's SparQ!
It looked great on paper and I bought it, with three tapes for backup. It quit working in a short time, but I keep them as a reminder to be wary. Spyquest disappeared almost immediately,
Windows ME came with my Dell and my only complaint is the uselessness of RESTORE. It never worked. Otherwise ME is OK.
Norton was a disappointment- Live Update stopped working. AVG is much better.

Y2K -- not the hype but all the archival software systems (Iomega , Cheyenne) and business accounting systems (MAS 90) that gave end-users no notice that they could not be made Y2K compatible until late Dec 1999.
Unfortunately, many small businesses who had the misfortune to rely on both are still reeling from the fallout.

Glad to see the 10th Anniversary Gateway system on there - that was the beginning of the end of Gateway as a player in the PC Market. The "Gatrox" was our pet name for the crippled version of the Matrox video card that went inside that system.
We were a bunch of Gateway fanboys and girls on Compuserve - loyal and dedicated - and then we started figuring out we were ripped off. Gateway was very slow to respond and lost the base that gave them their first ten years.

A mention of the horrible Netscape 6 probably should have been included with the AOL entry. I think the Netscape/AOL timeline would have permitted that. I was a die hard Netscape 4.x user at the time, but it was just getting too old as standards were changing and web coding was getting sloppier. I remember trying Netscape 6 and it was so horribly slow and buggy. I don't think I even tried it for more than a day. I used IE 5.5/6 for a year or more after that until the Mozilla suite got up to around version 1.3 or so.

I had a Deathstar 60GXP drive... It was getting glowing reviews at the time I bought it. Somehow I managed to get nearly 3 years of use out of it, including about a year of 24/7 use. It clicked its entire life but on the day it died I knew something was badly wrong. I was *very* lucky and was able to back up 99% of my data before it totally failed on a very hot summer day. It crashed just days before its warranty ended, so I returned it and they sent me a 120GXP to replace it. I buy Seagate drives now and it's probably about time to rid my computer of the 120GXP (which is storing crap like games and Microsoft Office.)

Everybody is mentioning Quicktime and I have to agree that it's a horrible product. Apple should sell the encoder software or whatever, but they've got to be kidding if they think I'm going to buy a player for fullscreen playback. Typically I use Media Player Classic but Quicktime doesn't seem to play very nicely with it.

Norton AV should be given a deserving place in this list for being very virus friendly and a reaource hog at the same time.

Where would technology be today without its failures? However, most software makers shouldn't be vilified for thier efforts to help newbies make the most of thier Pc's, e.g., Microsoft Bob, AOL, etc. Once one becomes comfortable and more knowledgable, the newbies graduate to more sophisticated software. Ufortunately, the newbies will then have to tangle with buggy software and years of patches, updates, and upgrades. Is it worth it?

I'm just wondering how in the world Packard Hell wasn't mentioned....

Thank you for the 100 Best, but especially for the 25 WORST lists.
A little stroll through memory lane is fun. I was a high school math teacher setting up a computer lab in 1984. We were in the planning stage and my supervising principal asked my opinion on whether to choose Apple IIe or IBM PCjr computers.
Even then the pathetic shorrtcomings of the PCjr were known to those computers guys like myself who did a little research. I recommended the Apple IIe computers for the lab (all 36 of them!).
My choice seemed very strange to my boss because (not being a computer guy himself) it seemed to him that "IBM" was superior to "Apple." He went along with my suggestion and signed off for Apple IIes.
When the lab was installed and ran beautifully with loads of educational software available, he had a chance to see the disastrous results of his principal-collegues who chose the PCjr.
Nyuk nyuk -- he came up looking like a champ.
Mike B

Great list, very funny in some ways, and yet sad that we have fallen for these plots. Bonzi Buddy should have been somewhere in there at least.
And to be fair to the lion king people, why arent there any more games that shipped horribly?

Norton antivirus after 2002 version, and hogs the whole computer, AOL is okay a bit, if your';re lucky you can get FREE service at AOL for years. Pcworld is a bit bias and I agree, WIN ME-okay a bit better than 98, however since the ME came with an emachines computer, I can't install it on no other computer-its a system restore disc. I have XP however my dell is out and this xp cd with work without activation and flawlessy on any Dell computer, I can't get it activated thru MS. :(

So its the Golden version of 98 for me and that is what i am using to write this.

As for the PC bias take this Norton rated good while AVG free the worst even tho AVG caught all zombie bots and trojanss and Norton didn't..what a shame, they must be getting paid to write good reviews. As for PC defender or whatever its called I heard was great, and I did test the FREE version out and its all good..

Also what is the use of having more RAM and a faster processor if you can only run two things at once...also since many put all their eggs in one basket and if your combo firewall and antivirus and spyware protection breaks down, they your stuck, unless you have backups... ;)

Also Zonealarm should be included, when I did have XP zonealarm let a hacker into my system, I had no viruses, trojans, nothing and someone hacked my computer and was watching me, I use kerio 2.1.5 which is the best of the best. On very very rare occasion does it crash when assessing a site and when i mean RARE, I mean RARE otherwise i just restart it and i am fine again.

It is a rule bases firewall and I don't get how hard it is to not let everything in (plus this firewall doesn't let anything out nor in until you let by hitting permit) Sometimes I have an incoming connection when surfing the net, however I just hit Deny and Create a rule, then I am safe.. :) this should be on the best list, if it isn't-i don't know I am on my way checking them out, also this has been done before as an article..

Bravo, what a great article covering technologies Hall of Shame. It was also a bittersweet trip down memory lane, resurrecting all the frustration of quirky technology. And to think, when some of these products didnt' work, I was quick to blame myself. Redemption.

Great list. It's impossible to satisfy everyone and it's impossible to not offend anyone. You need more space to list the worst 150 products.
SyQuest didn't vanish, AFAIK it was bought by Iomega. My list:
- Packard "W.C." Bell
- Canon cheap printers (ex: BJ200)... they died of underuse
- IE6
- WP for Windows
- WMP 10, RealPlayer & QTime. An alternative may be guliverkli
- Symantec's Winfax, Norton Internet Suite after v2001, SystemWorks, etc.
- Olidata, scammed my uni that bought hundreds of those for giving them to studends... no unit was working reliably after 5 months.
- Iomega that alleged "lack of parts supply" to abandon Jaz customers at early stage.
Can you do a list of worst customer support companies? I nominate Borland.

I would add MS WORKS to the list. It generally destroyed a computer when all you really wanted to do was load a cheap version of WORD onto it. Wipe and reload was the order of the day after MS worked your computer over!

Glad to see you captured AOL's outrageous and inexcusable service. As a tech, I can't stand AOL. On the other hand, I would have liked to see McAfee and Norton in the review. Both of these programs have not impressed me at all. I use AVG Anti-virus, Spybot Search & Destroy, and Ad-Aware Se. I have tested these against Norton and McAfee and guess who fell to a mere pain in the arse? That's right! Norton and McAfee. Did I mention Norton and McAfee's tech support? Aweful. Just a tip to all software companies out there. You make a product and sell that product to a paying customer. BACK IT UP WITH SOME DECENT AND INEXPENSIVE TECH SUUPORT!!!

How about Quickbooks "tech" service. After being told that my current version was not supported any longer they sold me the 2006 version.After 8 hours of talking to some one in India they managed to distroy 3 years of business info. I'm still trying to recature. AND, AOL, they are hands down the most unethical provider.

The zipdisk deserves an entry separate from the drive! The stupid things corrupted if you looked at them the wrong way and held way too little for their bulky size. The USB drives were the best thing that could happen!

The Gator Corporation was beyond bad, it was evil. I remember the first time I ran Spybot S&D and several hours I was amazed at how much spyware had been put on my PC. I felt even worse for the people who actually did check the Always trust content from the Gator Corporation box in IE. I vomit on them.

Yes, AOL wrecks your computer

What about the BD-5, the personal airplane from Jim Bede. OVER 10,000 people had put a deposit on this plane and Mr. Bede couldn't solve the overheating problems with the snowmobile engine he was using. He also came up with another failed device called a LightCycle.

CNET's too hip to post accurate system requirements, so even with a late-model machine it's possible to download 850 MB games that either stall or freeze. Kudos on AOL, but didn't seen any mention of it as a purveyor of kiddie porn, and nothing else (early years). Norton is - yes - about the fourth worst virus of all time, but uninstalling it is to be reborn.

This made me laugh out loud even though
I got burned by a third or these products in one way or another; the worst is my long ride on the bleeding edge of Win 3.1; 95; 98a; 98b; ME; NT and finally XT. I read this piece to kill time while I downloaded another 11 patches to Windows. Am I looking forward to Vista? Try Hasta la Vista! If I could do it all over I'd go Mac. This 25 worst piece should be a monthly column! Keep it up, gang. You're on to something here....

One of my former pet-peeves has to be any early version of Adobe Acrobat Reader - Esp in the dial-up days. If you made the mistake of clicking on a PDF link (w/o downloading the file to your desktop first) you had to wait till it finished downloading before your computer would unfreeze. What a nightmare.

And speaking of the IBM DeskStar (DeathStar)... it wasn't just the 75GB models; it was ALL of them. I had my builder install various models into some 60 computers he built for my company. 5 years later, only a few of those IBM drives still work. And becaused IBM copped a bad attitude when it became obvious that they had a real problem with these drives, I never buy anything from them again.

Creating MS BOB was an idea from Melinda Gates. It was sold about 30.000 times during the first two months. To the relation, Windows 3.1 was sold 3.000.000 times during the same time span and Windows 95 during the first three months 45.000.000 times.

I believe that you would need to add to your list the Commodore 64 business software. Hit the wrong button and it froze. Then you got the pleasure to start all over after losing your work. Plus the computer itself whose power source was the printer.

I WAS an Iomega fan. Bought the zipdrive (instead of a CD writer or hard disk upgrade) and countless zip disks. Actually, I didn't really mind the drive is broken. It's nothing compared to ALL THE DATA that I had invested in the Zip to keep.

Nowadays, I avoid ANYTHING iomega. If it carries the iomega brand, its an abomination! It's a company I will NEVER EVER TRUST to hold my data again, not even a single bit even if that bit is a 0.

I still cannot recover from the shock and sadness of loosing some very memorable data which I kept for more than 12 years.

To Iomega, we only loose drives and disks so they ignored. To people like me, that's 10 years of my life missing until today. I'm still searching old rusty diskettes, trying to read back scratched floppies, unformat floppies, clean fungus.. etc.. or go through every little pieces of frayed paper trying to rebuild them all. It has been like 10 years of searching techniques to restore data...

For one who kept journals, poetries, love letters, novels and short stories, graphic arts, ideas, working papers, formulas, etc... Iomega ruined my life by taking so much memories away. They've could at least gave a WARNING so I only loose 1 disk instead of ALL 30!

How I wished I could just sue them for the millions the data is worth to me... Sometimes I still pray the company just go out of business.

People make mistakes but to ignore them and cause others misery is just PURE EVIL.

I sent AOL a cancellation notice. Though I had included everything they required, I received a notice back saying I hadn't sent enough information. I called and they insisted on knowing why I was cancelling. I told them it didn't matter, I wanted to cancel. They kept asking questions. When I started to get irate, he put me on hold and never came back to the line.

I called again and after going through a painful 3rd degree as to why I was quitting, they assured me they would cancel my account. A couple of weeks later I received a letter in the mail thanking me for continuing my account. I got so mad my boyfriend hid in a corner and to this day says, "My baby doesn't go postal, she goes AOL!"

I agree with your first choice = aol

I nominate that "Compaq Trasher" I received (I HAD TO BUY IT AT A VERY HIGH PRICE) when signing up for SBC ADSL. That "august" company deserves at least a "Dis-Honorable Mention among the WORST of them all.

The fact that the Female Pres., who ran HP, wanted to merge with COMPAQ, is still a mystery to me. Until their merge with COMPAQ, HP was a rather trustworthy name. The GARBAGE I received was not what they SBC & COMPAQ said it would be. It had an 8 gig (claimed it was a 10 gig) HD that was partitioned for no reason and could not be un-partioned by a novice. The ADSL Modem inside didn?t work on arrival. A team of techs had to come to my place and replace it. Six months later, the clock died. Another tech from COMPAQ took it apart in my office and replaced the entire motherboard. A month after my warranty expired, after less than a year of ownership, the new ADS Modem again failed. An SBC Telephone Tech replaced it with one of theirs which still works OK.

Consider adding COMPAQ in your next Up-date of BAD Machines that had Excellent Marketing Ploys. Their SALES SIZZLED while their Junque Fizzled.

Windows media player
right up there with realplayer as the worst option for playing media

To go back long before most of you remember - add to the list, the documentation that came with most early software (a lot of current software, too). Cumbersome gibberish!

I've used all the WP programs beginning with 5.1 thru 12. Now have 12 AND 6.0 on my PC as 6.0 must be the ONLY word processing program that let's a writer get a count of the redundant words within a document. A valuable tool for an author.

I'll stick with AOL for several reasons, but I agree that there are too many ads and other such garbage forced upon the subscriber.

This is not a product but it is related to every technology product sold in stores today "Rebates" I absolutely hate Rebates and I don't care how cheap or great a product is I refuse to buy anything with a rebate. They make you jump through hoops just so you can get a few dollars back after all the effort to make copies of receipts filling out info , put it in envelopes waiting for months, if you get anything at all. Kudos to Best Buy for being first to get rid of one of the worst scams ever called Rebate.

Re: Iomega zip drives. Dead wrong. Have been using for many years with no problems, though I back up everything on two separate disks. As you can simply put a new drive cheaply in any computer, you have to be pretty dumb to lose data due to equipment or disk problems. More importantly: Your writers and readers are in a tiny minority of computer users. The vast majority of computer users will never back up or transport data using CD's or DVD's. But almost anyone can be tought to control/c-control/v to a zip drive. Many of my CPA clients do this now. Just about none of my small business clients will ever be comfortable "burning" Cd's or DVD's, let alone thumb drives.

Sony is obsessed with secrecy. When I registered my new camera, they gave me a coupon code for downloading a photo manual. The code didn't work and fixing it took several days but the funniest thing is that the manual was password-protected!

Wow. What generous props you heaped on AOL there at the end. I'd call your choice of AOL good marketing, since you know that's more sexy than putting IE 6.0 or IBM's PCjr. up there.

Always popular to beat up AOL, isn't it? Have any of you negative-ninnies been on AOL since 6.0? THINGS CHANGE. I have both Yahoo email and AOL, and I get no fewer than 25 spam emails a DAY with yahoo, and MAYBE two a MONTH with AOL. Hello? Hello?
34 million users, or whatever millions it is today, is not all made up of free-hours people. I get a great deal more valuable information and resources with AOL than Yahoo. They serve different purposes.
Oh, and Poster "deedo" -- Real Networks didn't sell itself to AOL.
Hey, it's the Internet. Address the concept that companies and products change too. Radical, huh?

IBM not only foisted the PCjr off on schools, they also gave employees a fantastic deal. A whole computer for less than a monitor. Mine never failed to run any IBM program I threw at it. It would run Lotus 123 spreadsheets that would not run on an IBM PC. Lotus booted up in less than 1/100 of the time on the PC (I had both). I had a 3 1/2 inch drive installed. I put full memory on it without the use of the sidecars. It was one of the first computers to have a wireless keyboard. The picture on your site has the non-chicklet keyboard which IBM should have offered as an option with the other one extra. Kids could use the peanut butter proof keyboard, adults could use the better one. It played 3 channel sound like the Radio Shack 1000 and regular sound as well. The monitor could display over a million different colors. It could be completely disassembled without tools, not even a screwdriver. The big problem with that computer was that it was very poorly marketed. I don't think IBM ever figured out that the P in PC stood for Personal. Pity. I am going to get a wireless keyboard any year now, I miss that one.

You forgot Messiah : video game that was delayed numerous times and wich commercial version, in the end, was crashing at launch or after 2 minutes of play.

I would also have mentionned Gator and Kazaa but there were quite successful even if they are nest of spywares.

Hi,
My name is Ted, and I just wanted to say, "THANK YOU SO MUCh," for doing an excellent job on researching pc product and posting up all the BEST and the WORST product here online. THis is really helping me a lot in doing my research to find the products that does actually live up to its' expectation in their line of product from all of the PC manufacturing industry. Now I'll know which product is actually worth the cost when it comes to investing money on products that I know is gonna give me both great performancve and reliability in the long run. Again, I just can't Thank you guys enough for doing all of this great jobs. KEEP UP the good work.

I just remember many years ago, thinking AOL was my friend, and it was so nice of them to allow me an icon for my windows 3.5 machine that said "connect to the INTERNET"... I also remember not knowing what to do once I got there, until a friend introduced me to a web browser named "mosaic"... remember that one?

I burned it all to the ground and put NT 4.0 workstation on it and never looked back at "amateur" operating systems ever again... (this reference is directed at windows ME... since it has caused me countless issues with family members begging for help)

I suffered the price of "driver compatibility", but I also learned a great deal about customer support, unix based email (as my only option), and ultimately how to be self-sufficient on a computer...

absolutely amazing that it took ISP's "forever" to remove the ability to log into port 139 and/or 445 for computers on their networks... I've seen some very very interesting things that I cannot elaborate upon...

One software app that I think deserves an honorable mention is SubSeven... yes, I know it was a trojan, but my god was it difficult to remove... I'm certain it inspired employees of software vendors, all over the world, to incorporate their techniques...

And Acer desktop pc's . i have had the privelege to rebuild a number of these machines after the hard drive has failed and failed and failed, usually within the warranty period --- who needs that junk data anyway --- it is only the poor clients files. one failed a week out of warranty so no free replacement for that client--one client had two that failed ---don't get me started!!!!
As a bit of a techfreak i always go by the golden rule --- dont buy new technology until it is proven tested and now bug free, and did i mention at a vastly reduced price from when it was called "cutting edge"

Wow, look at the number of people who took time to reply to this article--did you hit a nerve or what? Hope your sponsers (God Bless 'Em!) are noticing this.
But, your magazine has completely missed the importance & elegance of Real Audio's RealPlayer software. Sure, we didn't like how they paid their bills but DAMN that product was GOOD! 5 years ago I broadband was as unreachable to me as a new Ferrari but, thanks to RealPlayer's awesome codecs, I could have Fox News on live, 24/7, in a window in the corner of my screen though I only had a dial-up connection. While I was programming or researching or drawing plans or whatever I could keep up with the market with Bloomberg in the corner. I could watch "Naked News," who doesn't like to keep up with current events? Media Player's compression was squat compared to RealPlayer's (didn't MS think so too? Seems like they embraced RP for awhile.) Real, you rocked. Sorry we were all to cheap to pay you a living wage but, in respect, you're rich!

I can't believe PeoplePC was brought up only once... It is absolutly rotten to the core. It connects at a slower speed than AOL, offers less service, and eats RAM for breakfast. AOL is much much much better in comparison to PeoplePC.

WARNING! I recommend you DO NOT purchase any Pixtreme products or products sold by Snapsights. My daughter was given a defective Pixtreme camera for her birthday. Because we can?t prove the camera was sold by an ?authorized? dealer snapsights will not honor the warranty or even provide an address to send in the camera for inspection and repair, claiming a shipment of unauthorized gray ware cameras exists. Nor do they publish or provide a list of ?authorized? dealers. WARNING!

Lynn Helms
2440 High Country Dr N
Mandan, ND 58554
(701) 667-2950

It's kind of spooky how Wired magazine wet themselves over many of the items in the list, especially the CueCat (still in a box on my shelf) and iSmell.

I know I can't be the only person to remember that pinnacle of trust and guaranteed software operability - the copy protection dongle!

That would only be the start of a VERY long list including tape drive boot devices, front panel toggle switches, TI99, 8 inch floppies, etc., etc.

DEAR CUSTOMERS,
We are (PETERPHONESTORE NIG. LTD.) accredited wholesalers of
PRODUCTS/MERCHANDISE such as mobile phones, computers, laptops,
DVDs,Plasma Tv Etc.
CURRENT UNIT PRICE LIST OF SOME PRODUCTS/MERCHANDISE IN STOCK

LAPTOPS:
Toshiba Qosmio G15-----$200.00
Samsung Q30------------$200.00
Toshiba Portege R100---$200.00
IBM ThinkPad T42 2373--$300.50
Acer Ferrari 3400LMi---$200.50
ETC......

I feel vindicated after being faithful to Iomega Zip Drives despite having two break down and losing important data. I kept thinking it was somehow my fault.

In the early 80's at Stanford our department received a batch of DEC desktops. I was asked to "burn them in" for 24 hours and then distribute them to faculty and researchers. The users soon discovered a message that was MOST unhelpful: "Warning: You Have Just Destroyed All Your Data." I guess the time to have fixed the problem was between the colon and the "Y".

Justin failed to mention that he works for AOL.

Maybe you have forgotten

The Virtual Boy

Atari Jaguar

Panasonic/Goldstar 3DO

Those were the worst video games systems of all time

Nintendo Virtual Boy. Came out in 1995. Was considered a dead system within about a year or so of coming out. With the exception of Galactic Pinball and Red Alarm, most of the few other games offered were rather dull. Paid about 170 bucks for the system when it first came out. I've not bought another gaming system since.

The Brother MFC9200C should be on the list,. Try to keep the printer working and the replacement print head cost about every year is excessive and inexcusable.

I loved my Web-TV Plus. Surfing the web with a remote may not have been as nice as with a mouse, but it was far from excruciating. As a matter of fact, until I bought my Logitech MX-1000, I hated all mice.

When my Plus died, I bought a basic box, as the Plus has been discontinued, but I missed the PiP feature, so I broke down and bought a computer. When I went to cable broadband, I finally got rid of both my land line and my Web-TV.

MSN-TV, as it is now called, has morphed into something I can't seem too get my mind around, but I still consider the $250 I spent on that Plus unit gave me more bang for the buck than anything I have ever bought.

Now, I'm hooked on the internet and broadband, but there are an awful lot of people out there who could benefit more from a web appliance than they can from a computer. That population may be dying out fast, but I seem to keep meeting them and they come in all ages, from the elderly who can't figure out a computer to the young who don't know how to keep their computers secure.

My Web-TV now sits idle atop my VCR, which, though still hooked up, gets very little use, waiting for the day when the computer dies suddenly and must be pressed into service.

Oh my gosh, you got the two worst products of all time right where they belong, with AOL and Windows ME in 1st and 4th place! AOL is slow, installed tons of crud that clogged my Startup, and didn't even let me use all 56K of my modem, instead giving me a lousy 43Kbps connection! And of course, its "TopSpeed" thing...what a joke! It seems to slow down browsing rather than speed it up. Finally, when AOL launches, what does it do but pop up IM, channel, homepage, and zillions of other windows! Windows ME was trash, too. I upgraded (little did I know, I was downgrading) a few months ago from Windows 98SE to ME, and at first it worked nice, but then it got slow, and it froze up and crashed ALL THE TIME!! Not to mention it came with a Pinball game, but the background music wouldn't play, even though it was on the hard drive. Windows 98 worked better than it did! I finally bought Windows XP Home Edition and at least my computer works most of the time. Anyway, nice story, PCWorld! Do it again! :-)

Oh yes, I finally get my say on FREE PC. I happened to have received one and do not remember having to give my first born at the time. I do remember seeing PC World going wild over the ads on the screen. Now don't get me wrong, I do enjoy PC World, but I chuckle each and every month as I go through all the ads in the magazine. Someone tell me if I am the only one who sees the kettle calling the pot black!!!??? I still have that computer!!! Not in use though.

The IBM PS1 (circa 1991) perhaps the most compact, all in one, user oriented, object ever to be smacked with a baseball bat...and 'dropped' from a window...then dragged for 40 feet by it's power cord from my 88 Hyundai...yes it was that awful. Ask IBM...they thought so too.

I don't care about the rest, but AOL at position number one - that made it for me.

I have more...
IBM/BellSouth Simon
DVD-RAM
Early 1-2MBit wireless (IBM,Raytheon,etc..)
100Mbit ArcNet LAN (Tthomas-Conrad anyone?)
Stupid all-in-one Macs with 4/8MB ceiling
Samsung Sensor PC's (1990-1992)

I have to comment on the IBM PCjr making the worst list. OK, it wasn't the greatest. I excitedly bought mine 22+ years ago. The really funny thing is that it still works - IBM was into quality back then - a thing of the past now in our throw away society. My mom still has the PCjr in her basement and uses it to print labels periodically on an old dot matrix printer. Today, we are lucky to get 3 - 4 years out of a machine. This one keeps going - amazing to me. ... maybe just lucky.

You forgot the 3DO mainly cause my sister was suckered in to buying it, it was so bad the publisher "The 3DO Company" was put into bankruptcy because of it.
You also forgot the Phillips CD-i, the worst games Ive ever played were the Zelda games on that peice of crappy system!!!

Active Desktop and Channel Bar. What the hell was that. I just want to put a picture of a flower on my desktop.

Oh yeah powerwire networking. Someone is still trying to sell that. Wonder what happens when the vacuum is turned on.

Hey what about that Original Apple PDA.It was out even before the 3com Pilot. What was it called again. That launched the PDA industry, but sank.

FedEx Zapmail - nuff said

By putting AOL #1 and trashing the Timex Data Link product (which was weird but not awful, and re-invented, is still selling strong, with
an active open source community developing apps for their watchs using USB to connect), you took the low road. AOL was evil because of their business policies, not because of their technical faults. I never used it, and used to dis AOL until I attempted to switch over a customer to a POP-based E-mail account. A year later, having skipped Outlook, and now using Eudora, I still can not find an E-mail tool which is as easy to use as AOL's.

The 10,000 lb gorilla in the room is Microsoft. It sure is easy to pick on Apple, at least they were willing to make *big* mistakes, gambling big on some 'loosers' like GUIs (Apple Lisa- over-priced and stunning everyone who saw it), and Laser printers (oh well, that never did loose.) Where has Microsoft ever swung for the fences? If 'Bob' is the most extreme, then that is a sad commentary on a company that claims to be more of a tech innovater than a mainstream money-making coporation. (By the way the Product manager for Bob was
none other than Linda Gates.)

What about the Apple Lisa? (Apple's attempt to sell business computers through consumer channels.)

I am so glad they recognized Windows Millenium Edition. I was recently wondering if I was the only one who hated ME with a passion. That OS has been a nightmare. I had a client order a computer with it, inspite of my clear directions not to. They ultimately upgraded to XP since it was almost unusable. I really think Microsoft should give some of those poor victims a rebate. I've never seen a worse OS in my life.

- Any "server" edition of Windows. It is 2006, and Microsoft has NOT learned that YOU DON'T RUN A DAMN GRAPHICAL INTERFACE ON A SERVER!
- Internet Irritation, err... Information Services and ISA Server. Expensive stuff that requires a HELL of a machine to work OK, while Apache, iptables and other networking software run on Linux on a small machine, for cheaper.
- IE 6.0.
- The iMac G3 (the one where the CPU was together with the monitor).
- Windows XP authentication/WGA.
- Solaris for x86. The SPARC version is great, but the x86 version deserves the "Slowlaris" title.
- Winmodems (Lucent, Motorola, HSP, Conexant, SmartLink...).
- USB ADSL modems. They're the broadband equivalent of winmodems.
- Windows Media Player. I made the MISTAKE of installing WMP9 on my Windows 98 box, and regret it...
- Windows Vista. Judging by the screenshots, it will be Windows XP with fancy graphics.

I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU FORGOT WINDOWS 98 AND 98SE.
The CRAPPYEST Software I've Ever Used, But, I'm Stuck With It.
Good Going Microsoft.

My ex-wife !

AOL is a big practical joke being supported
by the Government to find out how many
stupids are using the internet.

They just get the customer list from AOL
so that they do not get entry into any
computer related government
assignments.

This is a brilliant article! One of the best that I've read so far.

Posted by Michael Reiher on Friday, May 26, 2006, 06:48 PM (PST)

>

Ah yes, IBM's OS/2 'WARP' (definitely warped) - I worked for a company that made propietary software used for designing and cutting shapes from metal (mostly ductwork). Another programmer attempted to sue them for stealing his software, but since theirs didn't run on Windows (as some of the others he succesfully sued) they were vindicated, but had to keep using OS/2 until the statute of limitations ran out. While I worked there I ran into a multitude of problems with OS/2 and attempted to call IBM customer support ($200 an hour--whether they fixed your problem or not). I finally wrote a rather pissed-off e-mail to IBM ending with something along the lines of 'you should be drug out in the street and shot' and of course, they called my company and told them that they would be sued for threatening their employees (despite the fact that I didn't say I was going to shoot them, just that they should be shot). Needless to say, I was fired, but it worked out--I got a better job out of the deal!

Posted by draysonic on Tuesday, June 20, 2006, 04:58 AM (PST)
And Acer desktop pc's

You forgot to mention their slick form factor cases that wouldn't hold a normal PCI or ISA card. A customer brought me one with a dead modem, and I had to order it from Acer (I pondered modifying a normal one, but then decided that it would really piss me off if I messed it up).

WebTV
When you have a 78 year old mother you want to send email to and you don't want to explain how to use windows via long distance. (To turn off the CPU in WINDOWS " go to START" SAY WHAT?)

WebTV was the ideal solution and the font on the TV was large enough to read with mature eyes. It allowed her to answer an incoming phone call an not lose you place on-line. My mother knew when she had a message because it turned a green light on.

From her easy chair with the wireless keyboard she could easily see the large text on TV and answer email. Mother used WEBTV until she got ill at nearly 84. She was proud she had an email address, could send emails to her grandchildren and could find Betty Crocker's website.

You guys were right on point with this story! Microsoft bob stinks! Realplayer stinks! Webtv stunk to high heaven when i had it! And I want to add AT&T's virus protection! It will freeze your computer like your hard drive is in the Tundra!

Kazaa would have been a great addition... how about Cyrix processors and ALi chipsets, too?

The Mac Portable shouldn't be on this list. It was a fine computer considering how long its battery life was. Yes, people found it heavy. Apple would have done well to offer an alternative lightweight laptop at the same time. The Portable had a very aesthetically-pleasing design, and people (men, generally) who used them used them for a long time after PC clone portables from that time were junked.

The biggest strike against the Portable wasn't its weight. The first version didn't have a backlight. The high price was due to the fact that it used a razor-sharp active matrix screen at a time when PC clones were using inferior technologies. It also used pricey static RAM in order to improve battery life.

Apple's engineers made a very energy-efficient portable. NASA liked it enough to use it for Shuttle flights. It was a quality piece of engineering, but not the perfect machine for everyone.

Jobs didn't like the 20th Anniversary Mac. And, it was a luxury product, hence the price tag.

A few days after I purchased Synchronys SoftRAM, I realized I'd been had. I contacted the company, explained that I felt their advertising was misleading regarding the product's quality and nature, and requested a refund. The support agent made the mistake of arguing with me, trying to troubleshoot, after I'd made it very clear that I no longer wanted the product. After escalating the matter to a supervisor, I did get my money back, but vowed never to purchase a Synchronys product again.

Another product of the mid-90s I remember with little fondness is the NexGen processor. The one I purchased was touted as being equivalent to a 486, but much cheaper. Well, it was certainly cheaper, but it wouldn't run most of the programs I had that required an Intel 486 processor. I returned it to the vendor, TigerSoftware, after a week or so; thankfully, there was no argument at all with them regarding a refund.

PC-Link was an online service for Tandy computers, using the Tandy DeskMate GUI. I remember it was $19.95/mo for basic services plus 10 cents/minute for "premium" services such as stock quotes and downloading. It was part of Quantum Computing Services, which also operated AppleLink and I think at least one other platform-based online service, perhaps for Commodore? It was Quantum that later evolved into AOL. AOL was available for Mac and also DOS PCs with a runtime version of GeoWorks/GEOS before Windows became relevant.

Sonic cineplayer which comes bundled with Roxio Easy Media Creator which I have never been able to get to work or even to register as to register you have to get it to work ! ! ! and to get support you have to register and guess what - to register you have to get it to work ! ! !

good list - you pretty got everything right. the problem with AOL is not that they were one of the first to do the graphic UI dialup thing. That's all fine and good - the problem is that if you dug more than 2 layers deep in the beginning, back to text and that really became their philosopy from then on. When dialup was your only choice, why did they insist on loading 25 graphic elements? Why did they did bother to set up a junk mail filter YEARS ago? Why is it if you're dead, you still cannot quit? All elements of their cluelessness.

It should be noted that while the CueCat ad concept was crap. At that time, it was a cheap hack to get UPC reader and worth money on eBay for many years :-)

Unlike that AT&T tablet/phone thing - I think you forgot that. What about that Coleco PC (The Adam?) While the Pippin' was clearly crap - at least it barely was released so how many did it really disappoint versus the Coleco PC that sold thousands for Christmas and would barely boot up on XMas day i

More annoying than any of these products is the user flow and irritating manner in which you provide the content of this story on-line.

Your web site is #1 in the most irritating rivaling the UI of AOL.

Make a note

My vote for the worst is for a DOS program called "Doublespace". It would give you a little extra room - but slow your system to a crawl.

And how can I forget KaZaa - I put it on and watched. I gave it specific directories, but it allowed people to poke around in my root directory. Bump that! Five minutes, that was all I ran it. Unplugged the network cable, and permanently scrubbed KaZaa from my system.

I didnt think this was approprate, but someone else mentioned it AT&T yahoo internet tech support service. $99 for five days $139 for 6 months like a fool I went for the 6 months It took me 3 phone calls to find out the techs had not a clue I was telling them what to do, one tech actually went to sleep on the phone. Keep in mind all this took place in one day I ask for a refund The last tech said he did $99 worth of work. Never did fix my problem.

What about, what is without a doubt, the worst recording software anywhere, ROXIO MEDIIA CREATOR 9. This DOG is not compatable with any OS. A total pain to INSTALL, UNINSTALL, & USE. This software has so many "BUGS", you need to call a profesional externinator for tech support!!

I own and still wear an original Timex Data-Link. I was flabbergasted that any competent engineer would design a watch that would allow you to set recurring alarms for "3:00 on the 22nd of every month" and "3:00 every day in November"(!) but not allow you to set the most useful type of recurring alarm, "3:00 every Friday (staff meeting)." Then I learned the software was written by Microsoft. Mystery solved!

Cyrix...the so called 'promised land' for Nat Semi....fell flat...making pcs grind like a expresso machine and run as fast as a Yugo pulling a semi-trailer. Thank God, they wised up and chucked it.