If It Prints, I'll Let You Know

When we come to think of it, we may consider this period as the age of the laptops. This machine has, indeed, gone from being a convenient add-on gadget for the select few to being part of the mainstream. It is not uncommon for households to have more than just one laptop, and to see old desktops gathering dust in a corner.

Anyone who owns a machine or a gadget, however, has one thing to think about — reliability. Surely, no one will want to part with hard-earned cash to purchase something that will conk out in a day or two.

A feature on CNET.com discusses reliability, and how the various laptop brands fare against each other. Some of the data, indeed, came as a surprise; there are some brands out there that we thought could perform better. This information is nice to have before we head out for the shopping extravaganza of a lifetime on Black Friday.

The feature referred to a research paper released by the warranty firm Square Trade. They analyzed the failure rate for 30,000 laptops and compared the failure rates of various brands and hardware categories. According to the paper, over a period of three years, one out of three laptops is expected to fail; that is certainly a frequency that is surprising, and a bit concerning.

Leading the pack as far as reliability is concerned are Asus and Toshiba, which also surprised us somehow since we were not exactly too happy about our Asus. But then again, it was rather unfair for us to pit a Dell laptop against an Asus netbook, and the figures do speak for themselves.

Among the least reliable as far as the analyzed data was concerned were Acer, Gateway and HP; these three brands reportedly had higher than average failure rates.

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