The Worst PC in America
[UPDATE: We have a winner! Thanks to all who entered...]
I'm not eligible to enter Technologizer's contest to find the worst PC in America, and therefore don't have a shot at the HP Envy 13 laptop that the winner will receive. But I'm kicking things off by telling you about the worst PC I still own. Like many bad PCs, it started out as a great PC: When I bought it (in 1994, I think, for about $1000--even though it was refurbished) I was extremely proud of it at the time. After all, it was the first notebook I'd ever owned.
It's my Zenith Data System Z-Lite 425, a subnotebook which, even today, has an appealingly slim profile (albeit with a screen that's bizarrely small by current standards--at least it leaves room for ginormous contrast and brightness controls).
The Z-Lite has a fairly small power brick with a snap-on floppy drive that optionally sits in between the brick and the laptop. The drive no longer works, but I need to use it because I've lost the cable that lets the brick connect directly, and the battery is so weak that the system dies within twenty seconds or so if I unplug it. The connector on the floppy drive is broken, but still works if I wiggle it into place just so.
At some point--this decade, I'm guessing, I tried inserting a Compact Flash card in a PC Card adapter into one of the Z-Lite's twin PCMCIA slots. It didn't work. Which leaves me at a loss as to how to get information in and out, since the system doesn't have a modem or Ethernet, and I don't think I could easily figure out how to use the parallel or serial ports to do the job.
The worst bit of physical damage to the system--which I only discovered when I took these photos--is that one of the hinges is broken completely in two. The screen is connected to the other half of the machine only by one hinge; I'm amazed that the computer still boots at all.
The Z-Lite is running DOS and Windows 3.11; Windows doesn't look so hot on its monochrome screen, and the snap-on trackball that the machine came with broke long ago, so I have no pointing device.
Here's a list of some of the software I depended on in the mid-1990s.
And here's an e-mail (which I received via cc:Mail for DOS in 1995) from Steve Bass advising his PCW colleagues to take Melatonin to prep for the arduous journey to Spring COMDEX.
And when I opened Word 6.0 for the first time in around 13 years, it automatically loaded an unfinished manuscript for a review of e-mail clients which I was working on the last time I ran the program.
Okay, just pulling this computer out of my closet and booting it has made me nostalgic for an earlier era in my life, not to mention an earlier era in tech. But let's face it--in its current condition, this is a really bad PC.
Ready to enter our contest by telling us about your truly terrible PC? Read the rules and regulations, then tell us about it in a reply to this post. And even if you don't enter, feel free to chime in with your thoughts about my lousy PC or any others that people share with us here.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Jennifer on -
I can tell you for a sure fact that my computer is the worst PC in America. Nothing is attached together. Everything is separated. The display isn’t attached to the keys and the keys are held onto the main part of the computer by a cord. It’s madness. It lack any portability what so ever unless carting heavy loads around is considered portable. I would say my PC is about the size of a small child and probably weighs as much as one too. I can’t take my PC anywhere not only because of the weight and size, but because it needs a power cord for life support; so I’m permanently fixed to an outlet when I want to use my computer. For how immensely huge it is, it can’t do anything except catch tons and tons of viruses and pretend to be a furnace. However, this is somewhat useful in the winter but a little bit dangerous when it starts to overheat. If I don’t turn it off, no worries it will turn off on its own. Woohoo! It has less than a gigabyte of memory so when I use it and slowly wait for everything to load it starts screaming at me that I have low virtual memory. The processor is also an Intel Pentium 4 at 1.4 MHz. Yea way to go! The display you may ask, oh yea, its huge. It’s 13 inches in diameter and 18 inches in depth. That’s right, projection display. Say hello to my little friend: The homemade desktop PC.
Oh yea. To cart this lovely little baby around I need a pretty big battery pack.
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Permalink Reply by Matt Shaffer on
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Heh, I have a silly ancientish laptop. Probably nothing compared to a lot of you, but I thought I'd share...
(Does not see BBCode options, doesn't bother trying to add bbcode to post)
(Scaled to 800x600; originals were 7mp. Can provide higher quality if anyone cares.)
http://imgur.com/AzfGN.jpg
http://imgur.com/VwcdX.jpg
http://imgur.com/RMULP.jpg
And they're pretty much all bad photos, because like most point and shoots it fails with automatic color balance. Moving on...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7sIUDturGk
(Oh, and when I mention the screen sometimes acts weird and blacks out, it's not the blackout you originally see! That was it being smartish and turning off the monitor when running on battery. When the screen blacks out because of the monitor being twitchy, the monitor is ON. I'm sure you guys can understand the difference.)
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Permalink Reply by William D on -
I come before you today, not to speak of a computer with problems that could be solved with better software, or are the direct result of misuse, but instead a computer that it pure evil. A machine that was spawned by the Great Old Ones themselves. This machine of which I speak must not be named, suffice to say that from the outside it appears to be an original Compaq Portable. Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, physically is a Compaq Portable, with it's single 4.77MHz Intel 8088, it's 128 Kilobytes of RAM, and it's 9” 80x25 Monochrome display. But lurking within this physical manifestation is a heart of darkness and a soul of malevolence.
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/zwvB9aufhXAZhdISqyfcZg?feat=em...;"/>
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This device of such malicious cunning was passed on to me by a fellow IT pro, who's career had seen the rise and fall of Netware, and indeed that is where our story begins. You see, this machine was once the possession of Novell, and it was during their ownership of it, that it was able to effect the face of the IT industry even to this day. How so, you ask? Through the vile, corrupting evil that emanates from it, this device was able to bring down what was once the cornerstone of office servers, it's decline throughout the 90's thus allowed Microsoft to take over control of the market. In so doing, it cost thousands their jobs, and brought about the creation of Windows ME and Vista, both spawn of it's blatantly evil purposes, as well as countless other atrocities.
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It has only been through our containment of this Binary Beast that further crimes against humanity have been prevented. Even now the effects of it's incarceration can be felt across the industry. For example, the horrible Vista is being replaced by the excellent Windows 7. How are we able to keep it contained you ask? Through the use of a Temporal Field Generator, we have been able to hold this abominable adding-machine in a state of Relativistic Flux, but we may not be able to do so for much longer. For you see, the field generator is controlled by an old HP ZE4145 and even now, this Dread Digitizer is working it's evil on it, causing it to power down at random intervals, as well as the display to shut off, thus compromising the integrity of the field, and allowing it to effect the outside world.
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The most recent case of Temporal failure occurred on October 1st, the same day that the Tmobile Sidekick outage began, the effects of which are still being felt. Coincidence? I think not. It is only with your help and that of a new HP Envy 13, with it's Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, ATI GPU, Blu-ray drive, and of course Windows 7, that we will be able to overpower this Device of Unmatched Malevolence, and prevent the perpetration of any further acts of evil. Truly this is not only the worst PC in America, but on this plane of existence. Please, help us end it's reign of terror.
Thank You.
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Permalink Reply by Wayne Pierce on
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OK, I've got you all beat. You don't know a bad PC until you've tried some of the orphans I have. I've got two that are great for what they can do, but they are wicked limited: The first is one I love: The IBM PC Convertible. Yup, it's only got two floppy drives! I used it about 2 years to do newsletters on it's thermal printer and a few spreadsheets, but no graphics, DOS 2.1 and boy, what a slow speed! You were always waiting for the floppy drives to run. And battery life was about 45 minutes... Wow!
The second is the IBM PCjr. My two boys loved to death. It had great graphics, but still just a DOS 3.1 machine. I loved the sound capabilities. I have this BASIC program I wrote that did sound time shifting and you could ding a glass, slow it down and it now sounds like Big Ben chiming.
Oh, yeah, when is the last time you saw a Koala Touch Pad?
As you can see, the both are probably not working well, but with new batteries, I bet both would be working. Unfortunately, you would not get any work done. Ahhh... nostalgia. Those were the days...
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