Four years ago I decided to buy my parents a new computer. Because they had limited space I thought I woudl be clever and buy a very slimline case. I got a HP Pavilion s5-1060 - Core i5. The case in like 4 inches wide...fine if you just buy it and forget it, a nightmare if you want to update it. It has a dinky video card and 6GB of RAM. Six gigabytes is not to shabby but I don't get the benefit of duel channel memory and a new video card has to be a extremely slimline model which is not really the mode most cards come in.

I, of course, didn't know much about computers at the time, and really was not thinking of upgrades. But now that I know more, I see I made this more of a pain then it would have been with a Midtower ATX form factor. (I suppose I created an interesting update puzzle...that must count for something.)

Have any of you bought something only to learn much later you just messed up without knowing?

I have no idea what the fuck any of this means but it sounds terrifying. That is why every time I think about building a PC I end up saying "fuck it."

@darthorange: It's actually an example of why you should build your own.

yeah prebuilt cases are garbage, especially HP cases.

can't think of any major cases of buyer's remorse (quite a few minor ones maybe, but they don't really matter). i do regret selling my car a few years back for a significantly miniscule amount when it was non-operational and i was in some financial hot water. guy i sold it to who i originally thought was an ok dude turned out to be a dick, too. eh, live and learn.

I almost had a problem of this manner when I bought my new graphics card. It's 10 inches long and barely fit into my case; if I had gotten the other card I had been considering (11 inches), I would have been screwed. One of the few things it can be hard to test before the occasion comes up.

My best example of this is that I bought a dead-end CPU--in terms of chipset and further support--for my last build and didn't know about it. It took me nearly two years to finally bite the bullet and buy an all new MB, CPU, and memory to compensate for my mistake earlier, something I really regretted.

Yeah, pre built PCs are stupid. They are designed to have to be brought in to get fixed/upgraded. Even full towers they put in things that block you from getting at drives with ease. Not much you can do about it if you go that route.

I guess my only regret buying thing was a case that was killing mobos. Had to go through three before I got it through my thick skull that the case was killing them.

I do regret buying that 3D Club Radeon HD 7750 a few years ago, but it was at the time the only somewhat powerful card that would fit in my case. Either way, it was more expensive than comparable GPU's (but that were dual slot, which wouldn't fit) it started off by tripping my motherboard's surge protection every time the computer went to sleep mode, forcing me to disable all energy saving features (despite low energy consumption kinda being a core thing I considered when building my rig), and then, just after warranty had expired, the GPU fan suddenly fell off while it was turned on, flying around in the case damaging cables and a 3 TB hard drive (which thankfully still was covered by the warranty).

actually getting the 8800GTX for $600 around when it was new was kind of a regret, when i probably could have gone for something $200ish cheaper with about the same capability. it served me well for a few years, true, but it was also just the right amount of disappointing (went in on it thinking it would run crysis at max with no problems. boooooy was i wrong...)

Pardon my stupidity, but how does a case kill mobos?? I've never heard of this before and hearing this now maybe it can prevent in the future from a similar issue you had.

you can short the board out if you don't put all the standoffs in (e: or put none in and just think you're supposed to screw it flush to the back of the case, actually). they're supposed to help ground the motherboard to the case.

To be honest, I just got into assembling my first build, so when I opened this slimline case I sort of knew what to expect, but then it hit me, "Wow, this case is small. Then I started looking at video cards and I said, "Crap I need a very special sort of card if I want to put in a new one!"

I just spent the past five weeks studying how to build a computer, so I have been immersed in motherboards, cooler, CPUs, GPUs, RAM, power supplies. I have even been looking at cases, so when I really looked at my parent case I understood why a tiny case they had. Its is the worst case scenario really. A tiny case, no cable management possible, and a very defined set of periferals that could be used...it supposed to be that way...this is really a system meant for very little updating.

However, as I said this system is just a special sort of puzzle. It is an "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" case...but no impossible. I have researched a card that will fit that is a worthy update...it won't run full power in the older PCI-Express x16...but it will work. The RAM issue is easy, but it means pulling out some perfectly good DIMMs for some other project.

With that said, I really do wish I had not bought them a slimline case PC.

@counterclockwork87: I'm not really sure, I could be wrong, but it hasn't happened since I went with a different case. But with the first case I put in more then enough struts and the rig would run fine, but at random times the rig just wouldn't turn back on. So my thinking is that the way the case was built it was slowly killing it by begin not grounded (or whatever the opposite is that they do) somewhere. I'm sorry if I'm answering strangely. I'm really tired at the moment.

A case I had about 10 years ago was kinda like that, for some reason there was a metallic part on the back of it that made contact with the ports on the back of the board. It produced visible sparks when I connected USB devices to it. Somehow it never fried though, as far as I know it still works, though it was a low end Pentium II, so it's barely even supported by any graphical linux distributions anymore.

Yeah I once opened up a pre-built to see if I could salvage the hard drive and maybe the PSU and the parts were like soldered into place so you couldn't remove anything unless you had a saw or something. Prebuilts are junky, always build yer own.

Ya I bought my parents a dell OptiPlex off the internet and didn't realize it was the ultra small form. It's built like the first 360 model, doesn't even have a cpu fan.

It's a matter of learning terminology. If you're sitting in front of a computer, you should probably take the time to learn what RAM is, or maybe figure out just what sort of measurement "gigabyte" refers to. Neither of those things take hours to figure out, so it's not really much to research.

On topic, you probably shouldn't try to upgrade that computer. I haven't researched it, but I wouldn't bet on it having enough cooling or enough power for any video card that you put in there, if you can even put a video card in there at all. And anything you can get in there probably isn't powerful enough to do much more than what you already have.

Does it even have a video card? Wouldn't it have an onboard chip instead?

@dfl017 said:

Ya I bought my parents a dell OptiPlex off the internet and didn't realize it was the ultra small form. It's built like the first 360 model, doesn't even have a cpu fan.

Okay, you win, that is FAR worse than my situation. Jesus wept what is the blue thing...a computer chastity belt?

@monkeyking1969 said:

@dfl017 said:

Ya I bought my parents a dell OptiPlex off the internet and didn't realize it was the ultra small form. It's built like the first 360 model, doesn't even have a cpu fan.

Okay, you win, that is FAR worse than my situation. Jesus wept what is the blue thing...a computer chastity belt?

That's pretty much what the new Steam Boxes will be right?

I remember I bought a prebuilt once. The salesman could best be described as a filthy liar.

@monkeyking1969: What are you upgrading in the PC? The current hardware is capable even by today's standards. Only thing I can think of is the Hdd could use an upgrade since it's getting old.

Yes, I bought an HD6990.

Seriously CorssFire is compatible with nothing (and it's so power-hungry... and it cost so much).

While I'll always advocate to build your own PC, pre-built PCs aren't terrible unless the OEM uses proprietary components. Dell, HP, and other big named PC manufacturers are guilty of this. Small vendors like Digital Storm usually use off-the-shelf components to build a rig. The only proprietary piece of equipment they might use is the case, but those are often designed with consumer-upgradability in mind. So if you want to get a gaming rig but don't want to build it yourself, get one from a reputable PC vendor. Don't be scared to build one yourself though. The amount of information and people online that are willing to help you build your own PC is stupendous.

@vuud said:

@monkeyking1969 said:

@dfl017 said:

Ya I bought my parents a dell OptiPlex off the internet and didn't realize it was the ultra small form. It's built like the first 360 model, doesn't even have a cpu fan.

Okay, you win, that is FAR worse than my situation. Jesus wept what is the blue thing...a computer chastity belt?

That's pretty much what the new Steam Boxes will be right?

It looks like the plastic cover they put on new car engines to make them look clean and not-engine-like.

I walked my mom through buying a laptop and a TV over the past couple years. Now she has better shit than I do. I think it's about time I go buy some new gear.

Yeah, there is a video card a AMD Radeon 6450, so you're right there isn't anything better that is worth the cost/effort. There are cheap cards, good cards, and slim cards but none are all three. So it not worth upgrading the video card, unless someone drops a ZOTAC GeForce GT 740 ZT-71003-10L 1GB 128-Bit GDDR5 in my lap for free. (If that Zotac ZT-71003-10L went below $50 I might just waste some money on it just to be stupid. Dare to be stupid!!!) The RAM is fine for what my parents want. Honestly, in two more years I might just salvage it for the CPU, HDD, and media drive.

The main reason I was in the case, was to clean it. I had to take off the CPU cooler to get all the dust out of the fins. This weekend I will take the cooler off again, to put a tiny bit for fresh thermal paste.

My first build used a discounted gigabyte motherboard. Turns out Micro-ATX is really fucking small and the video card I bought completely covered the SATA ports.

Thank god for right angle SATA connectors.

I bought a racing wheel like 4 years ago.

I used it once, by which I mean I took it out of the box and saw that all the parts were there.