OMG my worst purchase so far

FatRakoon

FatRakoon

FatRakoon

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
10,495
Location
Behind you... Naked!
Couple of months ago, my mum asked me to sort her PC out.

Its a PC that she has had for many years and its flawless, its an XP2200, Win XP, and 1GB RAM, and I knocked it up when the XP was the one to go for, so thats shows its age.

But anyway, I decided that instead of repairing it, I will just buy her a new PC.

I bought her a zoostorm primarily because it was only a ton and a half, plus, Im disabled now and have trouble building the buggers, and well... why not?

Anyway, what a pile of cack this piece of rubbish PC is.

She has given it back to me and asked for her old PC back. The thing is, that I chucked her old PC in the trash.

Anyway, Im having a play about, this has a 2.5" WD Blue Disk in it, and can I get windows to see ANY OTHER DISK? NO! - Bios sees them fine, but Windows simply wont. Not in IDE, SATA, or RAID mode with any drivers?

I keep getting this EFI or whatever CLI come up, thats getting right on my pip now.

Last night, I got Win7 installed onto it, and it was so desperately slow that I was utterly unable to use it in any serious way, but then it failed to boot after some time for no reason? Now I cannot get it to boot onto anything other than that CLI again.

The thing is, that when I first got it, it took Win Vista just great ( I only have spare Vista licences and my mum needs it to be legal ) in fact, I kind of wanted it for myself it ran Vista that good.

But now?

The Motherboard is the MSI A55M-P33 and its a nice little board that I want so much to play about with cos its got one of those APU CPUs in it.

But my god, this has to be the worst pile of cack I have ever had the misfortune to buy.
 
Last edited:
With regards to the other hard drives not being visible if they are blank unformatted new ones you possibly need to initialise them.

I skipped vista as its god awful, but if the procedure is the same as windows 7 then right click computer, click manage and you've got a disk management section in the window that pops up.

You should be able to see the drives there and you need to right click and then initialise them.

As for it being slow, I'm unsure.

What exactly have you put in the PC?
 
Give her one of your 4 PCs you miserable git :)

Seriously you get what you pay for especially when you don't build it yourself, I realise you knew you'd struggle to but perhaps enlist a mate to help you out? It's not as if it takes long and I know some of my friends would jump at the chance of learning how to build their own PCs.. as most are too damn lazy to just try!

Ps. TL;DR and cool story bro etc ;)
 
Bought a cheap zoo storm for work, it was horrendous and I sent it back for a refund, had all kind of weird disk errors and I tried a couple of hard drives on it so it was a board issue
 
I've had the misfortune of fixing one of these for someone.

Power supplies are cack, cases are cack, hard drives are super slow.

You get what you pay for.
 
just had a look at their extensive product range.

Extensive is one word you could use to describe it haha

Seriously do you not like your mum or something, thats a pretty terrible thing to inflict on her
 
LOL lots of replies where do I start?

Ok, give her one of my 4 PCs?
LOL, the sig only has 4 lines... I have more... Much more... And no!
All she does is basic EMail and browsing. I have however given up and she can have my slowest PC that I have left. A quad Core AMD Phenom 9550 with 4GB and a 500GBHD is more than enough. So yeah... She is now sorted.

The visibility of the disks.
I know full well how to add a disk in any O/S including MacOS, Windows or Linux
This is when I am trying to install Windows ( XP, Vista, 7 and 8 all did the same ).
The Mobo sees the disks just fine, but when I try selecting a disk to install, it fails to find any. I add the correct drivers but nothing. IDE, SATA, or RAID mode all did the same thing. Although, I have never been able to actually setup any kind of RAID array yet on the board because I dont yet know how to, and thats another time.

Overall quality
Hell yes, I been piddling about again just now and the power switch has failed me.
It stopped working completely and the HD Audio has somehow cocked it up and it would not start up until that was taken out.

Again, for my mother, I have now sorted her out an old Quad Core AMD and thats running sweet now, and she should be chuffed with that... I hope she will be anyway.
I have given her a cheap Xigamatek case cos its brand new too, and replaced her PSU, again, a 300wat job I feel wont be a cool idea.

Vista.
The only reason why I put Vista onto it, is because she was on XP and I have spare Vista Licences and she runs a B&B and so she must use Legal licences... Id just put a cracked Win7 on it TBH but I wanted her all nice and legal etc, plus there is nothing really wrong with Vista anymore... Not sice SP2 I recon... Its good enough to do the job anyway.

Im now with that setup and I have managed to get Windows 7 onto it.

Funkily, I a have been able to boot onto an SSD at long last. I also have a couple of 400GB IDE Drives that Im using with SATA Adapters and I have managed to do software RAID on them to give me an 800GB D: and it has booted up onto the desktop just fine.
Im now copying a load of tools and utilities and drivers etc and we shall see where that gets me.
 
Take it back and just get your mum a decent laptop. Can get canny toshiba satalites for 300quid or so. I imagine it'd be fine for her
 
FatRakoon said:
The visibility of the disks.
I know full well how to add a disk in any O/S including MacOS, Windows or Linux
This is when I am trying to install Windows ( XP, Vista, 7 and 8 all did the same ).
Click to expand...

Apologies for trying to help! Seen as you know full well how to do all of this, either explain better in your OP or use your knowledge not to buy tat ;)
 
bledd. said:
You get what you pay for.
Click to expand...

Yes, but they paid £1500 (he said "tonne and a half") and I would have expected better than his experience. For a comparison, I bought a rig from OcUK for £550 that was a pre-build. It was a Shuttle system with Phenom X2 550, 4GB, 1TB, HD4850, blu-ray drive, loaded with Win 7 Home, 4 years ago in 2009.

d_brennen said:
Big dose of PICNIC by the looks of it
Click to expand...

lol PICNIC. I thought it was only my company that said that word. Certainly the first time I've heard that in 4-5 years :-)
 
Monserrat said:
Yes, but they paid £1500 (he said "tonne and a half") and I would have expected better than his experience. For a comparison, I bought a rig from OcUK for £550 that was a pre-build. It was a Shuttle system with Phenom X2 550, 4GB, 1TB, HD4850, blu-ray drive, loaded with Win 7 Home, 4 years ago in 2009.



lol PICNIC. I thought it was only my company that said that word. Certainly the first time I've heard that in 4-5 years :-)
Click to expand...

Who spends £1500 on a Zoostorm? I doubt it was that much. Otherwise it would have something like an i5/7 not an apu
 
Ripjaw said:
Take it back and just get your mum a decent laptop. Can get canny toshiba satalites for 300quid or so. I imagine it'd be fine for her
Click to expand...

Not a solution. She has a Laptop.
She wants a Desktop for her proper work, and she uses the Laptop for general stuff.

Plus, for £300, lets be honest, Id build her a proper PC. Like I said, it was a cheap PC that I got her as a surprise thats kind of sort of backfired.

-Mike- said:
Apologies for trying to help! Seen as you know full well how to do all of this, either explain better in your OP or use your knowledge not to buy tat ;)
Click to expand...

Sorry if I sounded a plonker. Not my intention at all.
But yeah, I was rather 50/50 on it, but the reviews on that very model were rating it highly and it scored 9.3 out of 10 plus, as I said, it was only £150 and I also wanted to play with an AMD APU for a laugh.

Monserrat said:
lol PICNIC. I thought it was only my company that said that word. Certainly the first time I've heard that in 4-5 years :-)
Click to expand...

I read that. I ignored it because its probably right.

Maybe I just need to get used to the board, but I have been at my mates house for the last couple of hours and he admitted defeat too.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom