When purchasing a laptop, it's important to consider how reliable the hardware is going to be, as they are more difficult and expensive to repair than a desktop PC. If the hardware turns belly up, most people have to jump through warranty hoops or are faced with high repair costs. One warranty company sought to find out just who produces the most reliable laptops, and after sampling a pool of 30,000 units, the outfit came to some interesting conclusions.

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Buy a barebones laptop kit and building one yourself > buying OEM

I work tech support and see a lot of laptops and I totally agree with the findings here. I would actually take it a step further and add in: "When a laptop breaks, how easy is it to fix?"

Hardest to fix: Some HPs and most Toshibas/Sonys. Easiest: Dell & Lenovo for sure, though I haven't seen many Asus laptops.

As far as "a third of breaks are caused by users"? That's TOTALLY true, haha. I can't tell you how often I've had to order parts because "I dropped it" or "spilled [liquid] on it and now the keyboard doesn't work".

This is a really cool study to see and it makes me feel validated for my feelings on some machines overall, heh.

"Buy a barebones laptop kit and building one yourself > buying OEM "

That's terrible advice. I can't tell you how many custom laptop parts I looked for and found nothing. If an OEM mobo breaks you will not find a replacement.

Buy something that is cheap and common such as a Dell. If the mobo breaks there are tons of replacements.

Hell my mom accidentally dropped my ASUS laptop a year ago and the only problems were the HDD cover popped off (HDD was fine) and a screw for the hinge got loose. After putting both in their correct places it hasn't had a problem since. I've haven't seen a 10 pound laptop fall like that and survive since the 90's.

There must be something wrong here .... We sell thousands of laptops and constant failing is Acer, then Asus, then Fujitsu-siemens. Lenovo and HP almost never fails. Toshiba dont sell so much of so dont know. If HP fails they fix it instatly...Acer keep loosing the laptop you send for repair...maybe its just a european thing ... .dont know.

I do agree with the study results. We have noticed HP's defect rates for new laptops creeping up in the past year, at least for those units that I've sourced for my company. This usually appears in cycles so I hope HP can get out of their low cycle soon.

Too bad they don't talk about repairability. Corporate laptops Dell (1) and HP (2) are the easiest. It is an absolute nightmare when it comes to Sony. We can't even look at the harddisk drive without removing the top or bottom panels.

Big surprise on HP there! I lost my confidence in hp many years ago when my printer gave up the ghost and my compaq desktop crashed (had to have them ship me a whole set of cds to reinstall the the system to factory default). As a trusted voice for computers amongst my friends, family and acquantances, I will be steering them away from HP especially after reading this. I really hope HP is listening, we don't need crap laptops. While it is good to hear they are easy to repair, it would be better that they made quality to begin with in order to avoid the repair step wouldn't it?

Hey, I was just going to buy a HP DV6, now can anyone suggest a decent priced laptop but with high performance parts.. I need at least a C2D, 2Gb Rab and >160GB HDD, a dedicated Graphic Card would be nice as well, can someone please tell me what to buy, I am gonna buy any laptop in this spec range next month...

HELP ME....

Maybe it's a South African thing too - most unreliable here is Acer (support is hopeless - up until a couple of months ago you couldn't even upgrade the RAM without shipping it to Acer).

Fujitsu next, then Asus - Lenovo, HP, Dell pretty solid in my experience - Lenovo the most reliable.

I find it interesting that in august of last year SquareTrade reported that HP had the best notebook.

"Our data shows that Sony and HP perform the best over time. They tend to have fewer issues than other brands," says Devin Thomas, Program Manager at SquareTrade. The two brands have failure rates that are about 26 percent less than the other brands combined.

So are we to believe that within one year HP now has the worst notebooks on the market? What data were they looking at last year if they claim now the data they are looking at is from the last three years.

Read the article from last year.

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Squaretrade-888128.html

I'm not here to defend HP. I don't really care one way or the other. How can you trust SquareTrade's current report when it clearly contradicts their pervious report. Both reports used tracking data that overlapped for a certain amount of time. I can't imagine the HP's systems have suddenly dropped in one year from best to worst.

Thoughts?

I just bought a asus g50vt from best buy and its pretty nice. Only had to reboot windows once and that was because i did some registry thing. Good support good hardware. Asus all the way. Even though my desktop is a hp

I have to agree with the HP finding. I bought a dv2221us in February 2007, and the internal wireless card "disappeared" 13 months later; turns out they did a major recall of the dv models to replace these cards and the motherboards. They run really hot. I bought a tx 1320us for my wife in 2008 and now the same problem has happened again along with periodic screen blackouts and the CD drive also "disappearing". As with the dv series, the HP user forums are flooded with complaints worldwide about the tx series, and HP won't do anything. Again the failure occurs right after the 1 year warranty expires. It's too bad as HP offers premium packages as very good prices, but I'll never buy another HP laptop.

I agree that HP Laptops suck. I have a dv9715nr - the sound card and the dvd player have disappeared. I forum are full of folks with similar issues. This all occur after 15 months. I will never buy another HP laptop.

Wow, that is complete bull. Apple is by far the one with the least problems. And Hp comes 2nd. I've never heard of Hp having a lot of issues. The only one I've found is over heating, which can be easily fixed. I've had my Hp laptop for 5 years. And it's still kicking!