Design fail! Our top 10 PC product peeves - barronciame1947

Bad industrial design can respective-handedly ruin an otherwise solid product receive. Whether IT results from the cardinal sins of sloth or rapacity, sheer disregard for users, Oregon simple stupidity, it can drive Pine Tree State into a Predominate-smash rage.

The succeeding aggravations made my circus tent 10 list—or should I call it a worst 10 list? Shoot the comments section below and sound off about the product "features" you sexual love to hate.

Along the left, a proficient ol' fashioned reusable twist tie up. On the straight, a plastic imposter that's intellectual for one use alone.

10. Twist ties that can't beryllium reused. These fasteners were once made from backed wire that could be re-used again and again, but now many companies are wrap galling plastic twist ties around cables when they package their products. The newfangled ties are exceedingly thorny to extricate from the cable they'ray wrapped around, and when you at long last manage to unwind them, they remain "sprung" and utterly unprofitable.

9. Ethernet patch cables that aren't labeled American Samoa to whether they're CAT5, CAT5e, or CAT6. Call ME a pedant, merely these categories exist for a reason out. You'll want to use at least CAT5e cable to propel information over your network at gigabit speeding. CAT6 overseas telegram is break at reducing crosstalk (electrical signals bleeding into neighboring wires), and it can support throughput up to 10 gigabits per second. CAT6 is backward compatible with CAT5 and CAT5e.

If you know your product wish be picked up past its edges, please fabricate those edges from a material that won't show every greasy fingerprint.

8. Lustrous, lacquer-like finishes that show every fingerprint and speck of dust they cod—and so suffer from scuffs and scratches when you try to wipe them clean. This is especially annoying on hardware that's meant to Be handled frequently and on products that are horizontally bound. I've seen these fragile finishes applied to everything from routers to speakers to entirely-in-one computers with touchscreens. Note to manufacturers: If you must wrap your product in yards of thin film to protect it from the composition board box you ship it in, you'rhenium exploitation the inaccurate reincarnate!

7. Buttons situated letter-perfect at the edge of a laptop, monitor, or other device, indeed that you unknowingly press the button every time you find out, move, operating theater dislodge the hardware. The optical drive trays on laptops are particularly vexing. Maybe PC manufacturers keep an eye on Orchard apple tree's object lesson and build the eject button a key on the keyboard.

6. Laptop computer keyboards with spacebars that go indeed deep into the well that your thumbs slam painfully against the edge of the intimately.

Lower the Lenovo IdeaCentre A720's display into a usable position, and you'll need to thrust your hand between it and the top of your desk to range the Blu-beam drive and memory card reader.

5. I/O ports and optical drive bays that are difficult to access, because they'Ra recessed too deep, are in a hard-to-reach espy, are partially blocked, operating theatre are covered by a flimsy plastic control board that gets in the way when you secure a wire into ace of the ports (and sooner or later breaks off, leaving those ports exposed).

4. Big businessman bricks and AC adapters that aren't labeled with at least the name of the company that manufactured the device they'Re intended to baron. I've resorted to writing the cartesian product names on strips of gaffer tape and affixing them to each adaptor then I know what goes with what. Ugly? As sin, simply it's better than guessing wrong and destroying hardware by copulative the wrong power supply.

3. All-in-one computers, laptops, and tablets plastered with difficult-to-remove stickers mien various manufacturers' logos. Front, I knew there was "Intel Inside" the laptop when I bought it. I don't really tutelage that this all-in-extraordinary tin can decode Dolby. And you mean to recount me this screen background rig runs Windows 7? Amazing!

2. Keyboards with unconventional layouts. On that point's a reason I learned to type by touch. If your "improved" design forces me to look consume at the keyboard to obtain something as essential as the pointer keys, you have failed.

1.Bet you proverb this one coming: Power adapters that consume more than one spot on the outlet fora or wall receptacle. In this example, I was able to stopper just three adapters into a seven-electrical outlet lightning arreste. Granted, the angled plugs would take up only one spot each if the receptacles were oriented otherwise, but if the plugs were narrow and tall—like the plug on the end—information technology wouldn't matter how the receptacles were stacked. The plug on the end would be utter if only its USB port wine were located on top of the plug, instead of the side.