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PC World's 20 Most Annoying Tech Products 349

Craig Sender writes to tell us that PC World has compiled a list of the 20 most annoying tech products of all time. Topping the list was AOL's ubiquitous free trial CD's. "This list hardly covers every annoying tech product ever made. But where did this list of 20 come from? [PC World Readers] picked the worst ones by voting in our Annoyances Poll, and you'll see your Top 10 most annoying products flagged with icons. Just for fun, we've added 10 more products that didn't get enough votes from you in our poll but that we found particularly irksome."
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PC World's 20 Most Annoying Tech Products

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  • Lotus Notes (Score:2, Interesting)

    by alexj33 ( 968322 ) on Monday April 16, 2007 @05:11PM (#18756457)
    Where's Lotus Notes??? Should be in the top 5. Horrible, horrible, non-intuitive mass of confusion.

    Everything a UI shouldn't be.
  • Re:seems empty . . . (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16, 2007 @05:13PM (#18756489)
    Why is it that when I saw another story above the shootings story, I knew that the first comment would be about this.

    This may sound heartless, but the world marches on. Perhaps you need to take a personal day so that the rest of us can continue living.
  • How about.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fiannaFailMan ( 702447 ) on Monday April 16, 2007 @05:17PM (#18756623) Journal
    those 'Read more' links on /. that don't work when you click on them in Firefox? Or better still, the 'automated' phone menu systems that force you to 'press 1' or 'press 2' a squillion times before giving up and hitting a random number to get speaking to some human being somewhere.
  • Re:seems empty . . . (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16, 2007 @05:22PM (#18756741)
    Yeah, 30 odd people I don't know were killed in a country over 3000 miles away from me. I should be ashamed of gettig on with my life.

    Yes, it sucks to be the families of those people who were killed today. Are you one of them? No? Then what the hell are you concerned about? It's just yet more media-induced false grief for people you don't know.
  • by OldeTimeGeek ( 725417 ) on Monday April 16, 2007 @05:26PM (#18756851)
    Ah, yes. Iomega Jazz drives.

    I remember them.

    I remember multiple head crashes. Data forever lost because I was dumb enough to use them as my primary data drive.

    I also remember the sound of plastic and metal shattering when the disk was thrown against a brick wall across the room when it couldn't be read.

    Those were the days.

    Please excuse me while I go get a drink...

  • My favorite (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DonkeySpew ( 683848 ) on Monday April 16, 2007 @05:32PM (#18757041)
    Require us to retype squiggly letters that are virtually impossible for humans to decipher when signing up for new accounts. (Note to Microsoft: This means you.)

    These stupid things get me every time. It usually takes me at least 3 tries and I think Yahoo's are the worst.

    -Paco
  • by GodWasAnAlien ( 206300 ) on Monday April 16, 2007 @05:41PM (#18757265)
    i vote for the "feature" of touch pads that emulates a click with every inadvertent touch.
    -
    oops (f*ck), my cusor moved to some random place mid-sentence,
    oops i selected and deleted a section of text.
    oops, i clicked on something.

    addesso touchpad-keyboards suck because you cant turn this shit off.

    let's just say that doing taxes online with an adessa touchpad-keyboard is a bad idea.
  • Re:Biased list (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ex-geek ( 847495 ) on Monday April 16, 2007 @05:57PM (#18757643)
    Yeah. The list isn't well researched. Vista is on the list? I haven't tried it yet, but I doubt that it could top need to shuffle AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS entries on a per application basis. Realplayer is on the list? How could Realplayer possibly compete with Netscape 4.x in terms of annoyance? And what about some of the truly bizzaro UI experiences us Linux users had to endure in the late 90ies? I still get flashbacks from those.
  • by Draconix ( 653959 ) on Monday April 16, 2007 @06:12PM (#18757949)
    The 1-button mouse was to keep developers from relying on extra buttons, thus adding to the probable confusion of the end-user. Unfortunately, a vast number of ports never bothered adjusting for that, so eventually Apple caved in and started bundling multi-button mice (and probably because of Boot Camp as well) which are wonderful in theory, and freaking annoying in practice. My Mac Pro came with a Mighty Mouse. The scroll ball is really neat, but the fact that if you hold your mouse like an artist tends to (only using your fingers instead of laying your entire hand on it) it tends to interpret left-clicks as right-clicks.

    As for the puck mouse the original one sucked, but the one that came with the G4 was awesome. If someone made a multi-button version of it with a scroll wheel, it would be my favorite mouse. I had no trouble at all using it back in the day, as it had the dimple on the button so you could actually tell which end was the front, and it was a lot easier for me to work with due to its small size and light weight. I seem to be the exception to the rule, though; I also prefer modern Apple keyboards to the IBM Model M.
  • by dbIII ( 701233 ) on Monday April 16, 2007 @07:47PM (#18759609)
    On a similar note I used to do unimportant volunteer stuff at a public radio station. Radio stations used to do a lot with reels of tape (probably still do) and any current affairs shows or other pre-recorded stuff would be dub edited from various sources to the final tape. Every month Radio Moscow would send out a nice big reel with the last months worth of english language stuff - the station loved it - it went straight to the bulk tape eraser and then into the newsroom where they could never get enough blank tape.
  • by acvh ( 120205 ) <<moc.sragicsm> <ta> <keeg>> on Monday April 16, 2007 @09:54PM (#18761451) Homepage
    i thought that was pretty funny...
  • Re:seems empty . . . (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Chrisje ( 471362 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2007 @04:53AM (#18764667)
    I couldn't agree more.

    Funny, if 20.000 people drown in floods in Bangladesh, two liberals somewhere issue a two-line statement that "we maybe ought to help those folks a bit". If, on the other hand, some dipshit walks into a school in the Western world and shoots 31 people, I guess I'll be watching that and the discussions surrounding it for weeks on any news outlet I happen to stumble upon.

    Way I see it, the 31 of this morning are just a natural part of the 12.000+ people that die due to fire-arm related violence in the US annually. Then again, it's not the guns that kill the people, er?

    Frankly, I spent more time reading the useless article on annoying tech than reading about some school in Wichita that got another loony-attack. Because the latter I've heard so many times before, and the first is at least mildly amusing.
  • by TractorBarry ( 788340 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2007 @09:00AM (#18765991) Homepage
    Slightly off topic as it's not confined to a single product but....

    My absolute pet hate are the utter fools that produce code where you close their app and it pops up a dialogue that asks "Are you sure you want to exit ?". Durghhh...

    There is absolutely no excuse for this brain dead crap. Of course I'm bloody well sure I want to close your app that's why I clicked thhe close button/the Exit menu item/closed the window etc. etc.

    The only reason an app should confirm closure is when there is unsaved data that the user might like to save. There is no other reason to prompt me. I've just effing done something to dismiss your app now be a good coder and tidy up and exit.

    Thankfully you do see a lot less of this these days but it's still being used. e.g. I installed Ubuntu Fesity this week, ran Automatix, closed the program and here it comes again. Shame really as Automatix is otherwise top notch (as is Feisty) !

    Ho hum... different decade, samme crappy coding.

  • by bughunter ( 10093 ) <bughunter AT earthlink DOT net> on Tuesday April 17, 2007 @01:02PM (#18769197) Journal
    Awesome! Thank you!

    Now if someone can inform me how to permanently kill that accursed "Windows Update Has Installed Updates" "Restart Now?" "Restart Later?" dialog that pops up every 2 minutes until you actually restart. I don't mind restarting for automatic updates, but jeez, just tell me ONCE willya??

    This repetative reminder is highly annoying and infuriatingly distracting when you're in the middle of a 2-hour presentation, or are using the PC to run custom test hardware in the lab and cannot just stop what you're doing and restart.

    The best solution I've found to date is to drag the dialog down so that 90% of it is off the bottom of the screen. And that just sucks.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. - Edmund Burke

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