Laptops don’t come cheap and we don’t buy them every day, so the last thing you want to hear after you have spent a small fortune is that your new laptop could break down on you in the first thirty six months.
A recent study buy SquareTrade, an independent company based in San Francisco that specialises in providing warranties, found that one in three laptops will fail within the first three years and that netbooks break down more often than laptops.
Ok so we generally don’t pay out a lot for Netbooks but that’s not the point, we still rely on our devices for business, pleasure and for keeping in touch.
So let’s take a closer look at the study and see what is likely to go wrong and if any particular brand is more likely to fail than another.
SquareTrade based the study on 30,000 randomly chosen laptop and netbook computers that they had provided warranties for and only included break downs that were reported to them under warranties, not ones that may have been reported directly to the manufacturer.
Apparently most of the failures recorded in the study, two thirds of them in fact, were actually due to hardware malfunctions. The other third failed as a result of accidents.
The most reliable laptops and netbooks according to the results of the study came from Taiwan and Japan courtesy of Asus and Toshiba. Less than 16 percent of these laptops had hardware malfunctions of any kind in the first 3 years of use.
Next in the line up for reliability were Apple and Dell. Laptops and Notebooks from these companies had an 18 percent hardware failure rate in the first three years.
Finally bottom of the list for reliability and top of the list for breakdowns were Hewlett Packard laptops, with an embarrassing result of more than 25 percent of their laptops having shown a hardware failure in the first 36 months.
As for Netbooks, well the news is not so good either. For the purposes of the study, SquareTrade classified a Netbook as any laptop that cost less than $400 which is as fair a classification as any.
Netbooks failed more often than laptops in the first 12 months of ownership.
The study found that if you’re looking for a laptop or a netbook that will last the pace, the manufacturer is the most reliable indicator.
Loading ...
Leave a Reply