Who makes the most reliable laptops?
As most laptops are essentially commodity products comprised of the same stock list of components and parts, Acer Laptop Battery one might assume that all laptop brands are the same, at least as far as the general reliability of the hardware itself.
Warranty firm SquareTrade has just released a research paper analyzing the failure rate for 30,000 laptops comparing brands and hardware categories--and the results might surprise you.
The headline news is that over three years, one out of three laptops will fail,Acer Laptop Battery Acer BTP-43D1 Battery, Acer TravelMate 220 Battery, and that Asus and Toshiba laptops have the lowest failure rates, while Acer, Gateway, and HP have higher than average failure rates. Additionally, two-thirds of those problems are hardware malfunctions, while the final third are classified as accidental damage.
Netbooks, in particular, didn't fare as well--as one might expect from low-cost machines. They failed at a rate 20 percent higher than mainstream laptops. But keep in mind, since Netbooks are a relatively new category, this is based on only one year of data.
The full report can be found at the SquareTrade Web site,Acer BTP-43D1 Battery, and we've excerpted some of the most interesting charts and graphs below (and note that some of the numbers presented below are projections based on previous data).
The key takeaway is that laptops in general fail much more often than many other types of consumer electronics--in part because they're among the most complex devices one can buy, and perhaps because pricing pressure has led to lapses in quality control in the design and manufacture of many of these systems.
with it the inevitable confusion about how to find the best deals on desktops and laptops. In order to help cut through the clutter, we are once again scouring the shelves of big retail stores to find boxed versions of popular PCs, from entry-level systems starting at $349 to Core i7 powerhouses.
The difference from our normal lineup of reviews is that this roundup is concerned with the specific retail models offered by brick-and-mortar stores. These are similar to those you'd be able to configure online from companies such as Dell and HP, but may have slightly different names and features. Even better, thanks to deep holiday discounts, they can sometimes be a better deal than buying direct from a PC maker.
One way to use this guide is to pick up a Sunday newspaper sales circular (which will list the retail-specific models names of computers on sale),Acer TravelMate 220 Battery, and check here for a review before heading out to the store.
We've got all the entire list of models in our retail review roundup below, and we'll update this page with ratings and live links as the systems get reviewed over the next several weeks.
(Note: Apple's desktops and laptops, while popular holiday items, Acer Laptop Battery Acer BTP-43D1 Battery, Acer TravelMate 220 Battery, are the same whether purchased direct from Apple or in a store. You can find recent Apple products reviewed or profiled here: latest Apple MacBooks; latest Apple iMacs; latest Apple Mac Minis.)
