Square Trade, a group working from warranty data from 30,000 machines, has put together an interesting paper on the reliability of nine models of computers and netbooks.  At the three-year mark, about 31% of laptops will fail.  The worst offender:  HP.  The best?  Asus, with Toshiba right behind.

How this fits with my experience:  our Dell desktops have never failed, and my five year old Dell Inspiron 710m suffered a hard drive crash, but was recoverable.  Even with .5GB memory…it’s running Win7 with only trouble in the graphics accelerator.  My Sonys:  no failures over four years.  My Toshiba died a month into operation.  The current Dell is running like a top.  The HP tablet before it burned out its motherboard at 2 years (of intensely heavy use.)

Netbooks fail 20% more often.  Apple is only slightly more reliable than Dell.