Hardware Reliability

Within the past few months, I've had a number of components & accessories break. What's shocking, is that the equipment wasn't old (< 6 months). One of my hard drives failed, a SATA 160gb, ok - that was a couple of years old, so as annoying as it was, I put it down to bad luck.

Soon after, my Razer Abysuss Mouse broken. I opened it up and found what looked like pretty cheap parts under the chassis:

Underneath the board, I found two small pieces of plastic that controlled the DPI of the mouse and the frequency. These plastic pieces looked very inexpensive to produce and were very difficult to align with the board.

But that wasn't the main issue. The main issue was with the scroll wheel. Along with plenty of other Razer Abysuss users around the world, the scroll wheel had broken/dropped/worn. I admitted defeat and binned it - I'd long lost the receipt.

A few weeks later, my Creative Inspire T3300 2.1 surround sound's power button decided to break. The power button is on the remote that comes built into the system and not only is this button the button to turn on the speakers, it's also the volume control. I opened up the remote:

I was shocked to see that the volume 'slider' had a screw holding it in. Yes, you guessed it, every time you turn the volume up & down, it's slowly turning the screw, which means the volume slider gets dislodged and out of place. I screwed in the slider as tight as I could, resealed the light and soon enough, I had a green light, signifying all was well!

 

Maybe, I've just been super unlucky, but you don't have to look too far to find other people with similar experiences. I hope manufacturers will increase the quality of their products as time goes on. No matter what price you pay for a product - it should do what it was intended to do - without breaking - at least for a bit longer. :) 

Thanks for reading.