Laptop Reliability

A PC management services company called Soluto had recently done a report on the best performing Windows laptops. The firm sampled data from 150000 laptops over a three month period from January to April, analyzing application crashes, application hangs, blue-screens-of-death, boot time and number of background processes to generate a comparison that shows a real user experience.

The ranking by brands and models are shown above. The lower the score, the higher the ranking. Surprisingly, Apple MacBook Pro 13 is rated as the best Windows laptop although not optimized for the operating system. One of the main reasons is that every Windows installation on it is clean, meaning that it is not loaded with crapware. Another thing to note, Dell has 5 models in the list while PC Giant HP has none.

This can be a good reference on which brand and model to choose if you are buying a laptop. I'll share with you another good report that was published in Year 2009 by SquareTrade, a company which provides extended warranties to eletronics gadgets.

The line graph above shows the failure rates over the number of months since a laptop purchase. This graph will help to answer question like "Do I need to buy extended warranty?" and "If yes, how many years do I need to buy?". Every 1 out of 3 laptops has a tendency to fail after 3 years. So you should get another extra 2 years warranty. Better be safe than sorry.

This is another interesting graph from the report that shows the laptop malfunction rates by Manufacturer. You can cross reference with the findings from Soruto. However, this graph might not be so accurate as it was done in Year 2009. Anyway, the report is still a great reference for us. You can get the full report here.