Who makes the most reliable – and least reliable – notebooks?

Douglas (New user):

A friend of mine is on his third Acer owing to warranty claims (dead motherboards and dead hard drives in all specimens). Another friend has a Dell which has had no problems. My Lenovo got a damaged key on the keyboard, but this was my own fault. My sister had a Toshiba which had a dodgy hard drive and a fan that died, but they fixed that up (no thanks to Harvey Norman).

Phred (New user):

Quoting Douglas:
third Acer owing to warranty claims

As I maintain, Acer is a 2nd rate Beige Box builder, and wouldn't go near them with a barge bole.

Douglas (New user):

Quoting Phred:
As I maintain, Acer is a 2nd rate Beige Box builder, and wouldn't go near them with a barge bole
I wouldn't either: heck, I don't even recommend them to people I hate!

Michael Quinn (New user):

Such a bogus report. The 3 year figures are an extrapolation of the 2 year data, yet their lead heading of the report is 1 in 3 Laptops fail over 3 years.

They say Netbooks fail 20% more than laptops, even though they have only been tracking them for 12 months. They also define a Netbook as being $400 or cheaper - hardly the case.

According to their data - not one person out of 30,000 has an accident in the first month…

It just gets worse. It's crap "journalism" that no one reporting on this PDF seems to have actually read it.

Raindog (New user):

Quoting Michael Quinn:
Such a bogus report.

I concur, its garbage data, based on flawed statistics.



Quoting Michael Quinn:
It's crap "journalism"

No it's not! Journalism is based upon reportage, reportage wihtout fear or favour and hopefully without bias or too much personal opinion. Alternatively some of those reportage have assumed readers to be capable of forming their own opinions on the material presented.

Should we stop report of anything based upon flawed data or anything where the original author had a vested interest or a particular bias?
If so we would have to stop all political reporting and politician media conferences. You cheap shot from the cheap seats, did nothing to present any more acurate alternative.

K (New user):

This is a good example of how population statistics don't necessarily reflect individual experience. The most reliable laptop that I've owned was a consumer grade Hewlett-Packard purchased from Harvey Norman in 2001. A 2003 Toshiba Satellite suffered from motherboard and keyboard failure, whilst a 2005 Apple Macbook had an LCD screen fail and two keyboard replacements (under warranty).

Leo Plaw (New user):

x

Leo Plaw (New user):

I've had my Acer 9420 Laptop for three years now. Not a problem. I bought Acer on the recommendation of a friend who works in computer repair. Now if anyone can tell you what fails and what not, who makes the good from the bad, visit your local computer repair shop. My friend rated Acer second after Asus.

Big Boi (New user):

There is no such thing as a bad laptop, but a bad owner...

Raindog (New user):

Quoting Big Boi:
There is no such thing as a bad laptop,

I've got a stack bigger than you can jump over, of short lived and abandoned clunkers, that says you're very wrong.

Michael Quinn (New user):

Why would you keep them?

And putting them on top of each other isnt very good for heat flow - probably why they break. (Bad User???)

Raindog (New user):

Quoting Michael Quinn:
Why would you keep them?

Do you wish to make an offer on them? If not, you have probably answered your own question. As the pile reaches dumpster size they become reassigned.


Quoting Michael Quinn:
probably why they break. (Bad User???)

In reality it's stupid user. You know the ones that by based on shinyness at POS or the one that dont understand why a Satellite Pro is dearer than a Satellite, or a Latitude dearer than an Inspiron. The pile remains as a testiment to why it's a good idea to buy equipment appropriate for it's intended purpose. Mind you some of the things in this stack were likely not appropriate for any purpose ever.

Michael Quinn (New user):

When "journalists" merely cut and paste whats given to them - thats crap journalism. Any two-bit blogger can do that. In fact most bloggers usually do more questioning than most "proper" journos seem to.

If your happy to accept it - that's up to you.

Raindog (New user):

Quoting Michael Quinn:
If your happy to accept it - that's up to you.

Now who isn't reading what is presented to them? I had already stated I was not prepared to accept the data! But to reiterate I accepted that it was valid to present a variety of data from a variety of sources, but I am not happy to accept the validity of this data.


Quoting Michael Quinn:
Any two-bit blogger can do that.

Indeed and they can publish their particular biases out to an essentially unseen and unread void.


Quoting Michael Quinn:
In fact most bloggers usually do more questioning than most "proper" journos seem to.

And there they remain bitter and twisted, that they did not get the position.
Ever wondered why proper journos are proper? (your term) It's because they are paid for their work. If they get paid for their work and the bloggers missed the gig what does that tell you about relative levels of skill and ability?

todd_h86 (New user):

The most common laptop we get in for repair are 3 yr old Acer laptops usually dead motherboard, but we do get quite a few 2 yr old toshibas.... A few ASUS, not many dells, a lot of HP laptops with fried video cards thanks to Nvidia!

Tin (User):

The HP ones would almost all be hard disks or power supplies going from my experiences at one job (a school). In 2 years we've had 3 or 4 hard disks and at least 4 power supplies fail. Neither are made by HP, and all started failing more than 12 months after supply, so HP probably couldn't have seen it coming.
At my other job (a computer repair shop), the HPs that come in still under warranty have almost all been hard disks.

I'd say HP's been pushed up by the dud batch of hard disks alone. I noticed our last warranty replacement was a different brand, so I'm guessing they got sick of it.

Acer on the other hand - they are known to be dodgy, and their warranty is equally dodgy (refusing claims and accusing the user of breaking it).

pb2512 (New user):

My Dell Mini 9 has had 4 service calls in 8 months - 2 new motherboards, 1 new keyboard. So far I reckon it's cost them 5-6 times what I paid for it. Techos in general are pretty useless - board jockeys. But they're great (!) compared to the phone people - "Press the F12 key for me." "It doesn't have an F12 key - it's a Mini 9 remember?" "Ok, I need to put you on hold." "Turn on the computer and press the 2 key." "My keyboard isn't working, remember?" Sigh.

stefcep (New user):

On the Hp 2133 forum about 50% of all users there reported a dead motherboard. I was one of them. I sold it out of fear of what might happen after the warranty expired as some reported 3 motherboard failures in a few months . And bought a HP DV4. The hard drive failed after 3 months. HP NEVER again.

Ausman (New user):

Even Asus (the best vendor according to this report) has a 15% failure withing three years. Seems high to me! Not a big difference between best to worse overall... All the vendors should lift their game based on this (of course it's not always easy to determine if th user played a part in the problem occuring)

laptopper (New user):

oops- double-post

laptopper (New user):

You guys have got to read the data upon which these "studies" are based before publishing them as valid.

This study was based on the data of only 1 single price-search engine that happens to be a member of square-trade. The problem? The amount of refurbished units sold on this site (refurbs—from all manufacturers—have literally twice the likeliness of failure within two years than do new units, according to Consumer Reports).

On this price search engine, there are more HP and Dell refurbs than ALL offerings from some manufacturers. So, you sell one hundred HP refurbs and 100 New brand X laptops and then compare them for reliability? Any manufacturer’s brand new laptops compared against the refurbished stock of another will win in reliability. Thing is, it’s not fair and inaccurate to do this. When you consider thousands of sold refurbished units against the brand new stock of another, you get numbers that aren’t accurately comparable. Combine this with the fact that if you look at the data, HP and Dell lost-out by only a few percentage points then you’re faced with the fact that if you remove the refurbs from the study, HP and Dell would probably beat-out all other manufacturers in the long-term reliability realm. Instead they lost. How can this study be promoted as even somewhat accurate?

Also, as the larges manufacturers, HP and Dell are going to have a much higher unit number of refurbs, so they're being punished in the data for being bigger producers of laptops than the other companies--how does that make sense?

The study effectively compares HP and Dell refurbs with brand new model from other manufacturers. This study can only be accurate if refurbished units aren’t considered, or are considered only in comparison to other refurbs. Apparently, this was too much work for the writers of this study and instead we’re left with results that are either completely inaccurate or should be the reverse of those posted. Some “study.”

Click the "read me" .pdf and review the entire "study" (yup, the one based off customer returns filed from a single site that moves an inordinate amount of HP and Dell refrubs).

Tin (User):

My experience says they got roughly accurate numbers. We only sell new gear, and we get far more problems with HP than Asus. And at my other job, the HP laptops seem to be constantly getting warranty jobs. Power supplies and hard disks seem to fail 1 a month out there (and there's only about 15 HP laptops).