Study: Asus, Toshiba Make Most Reliable Laptops

[leon2006]

For me notebook should survive these conditions:

1) 24x7 Use except when i travel between work and at home
2) Survive my travel (Plane, drive, walk) inside my Notebook Backpack
3) 4 Feet drop while inside my Note Book Backpack @ least 1x 4 months. These things happens not by purpose.

My Toshiba and real-IBM notebooks survive these with ZERO-Defect. Never get any Display, Keyboard, HDD, PADs, USB failure.

The issue of weight and battery life is decided when you purchase your notebook. You can always purchase a lighter notebook and opt for a higher cell battery. That choice is available. Buyer must read the specs before closing the deal.

 

[hannibal]

For me the failure rait is allmost surpricingly high. Even with the best, more than 1/10 fails in three years. And even in two years the rate is 1/10 or even vorse.
But as also has been said. For most people even the least realiable computers are ok after 3 years. 75%... It's not the prand, it's how you use it, like dr. Truth would put it ;-)

 

[vladtepes]

Asus are ver good notebooks, except those with Nvidia northbridge or GPUS. I ve seen to many dead ones

 

[Guest]

My Sony's harddrive crashed after 3 years (out of warranty of course).
The rest of the machine is still working very good!

 

[ethanolson]

Something's wrong here. Do regular, abusive, and uncaring people at companies where they shove laptops freely into their employees hands run a lot of ASUS or Toshiba? I doubt there's a single large corporation that has standardized on ASUS. Most are running HP, Acer, or Dell.

I know by experience (really only about 100 units though) that HP's EliteBooks are solid and everything else (HP or otherwise) is just buggy sometimes. I can't stand the retail products. I'd only buy business-class from any vendor who differentiates those classes.

 

[necronic]

I love how everyone always responds to reports like these with personal anectdotes that somehow invalidate or validate the report on their own. Nobody here has personal accounts that have any bearing on this report, I don't care if you work on laptops all day long, as that means you are only representative of your geographic region.

That said, it strikes me as odd that the company that published this is an extended warranty dealer. Those companies have generally poor reputations, particularly in how they choose to define damage to a system ("accidental" vs "Malfunction".)

This causes me to look at this whole report with extreme suspicion. First off they have a vested interest in making failure rates seem high. Moreover, the data comes only from their customers, which is a strange group indeed. Frankly most people would never consider buying an extended warranty.

They also only included malfunctions reported directly to them. This means that product recalls or issues dealt with by the retailer aren't included.

And, of course, this hasn't been peer reviewed in any way shape or form.

Considering that the difference found between the different brands is so small, and there are many questionable issues surrounding this analysis, I am inclined to say that there are no significant differences between most of the items listed.

For more severe differences (failure rates of netbooks vs premium systems) the difference probably does exist, but to what rate is unknown.

 

[vladtepes]

[citation][nom]necronic[/nom]I love how everyone always responds to reports like these with personal anectdotes that somehow invalidate or validate the report on their own. Nobody here has personal accounts that have any bearing on this report, I don't care if you work on laptops all day long, as that means you are only representative of your geographic region.That said, it strikes me as odd that the company that published this is an extended warranty dealer. Those companies have generally poor reputations, particularly in how they choose to define damage to a system ("accidental" vs "Malfunction".)This causes me to look at this whole report with extreme suspicion. First off they have a vested interest in making failure rates seem high. Moreover, the data comes only from their customers, which is a strange group indeed. Frankly most people would never consider buying an extended warranty. They also only included malfunctions reported directly to them. This means that product recalls or issues dealt with by the retailer aren't included.And, of course, this hasn't been peer reviewed in any way shape or form.Considering that the difference found between the different brands is so small, and there are many questionable issues surrounding this analysis, I am inclined to say that there are no significant differences between most of the items listed. For more severe differences (failure rates of netbooks vs premium systems) the difference probably does exist, but to what rate is unknown.[/citation]

I live in South America, where computers are REALLY expensive. When a notebook dies we send it to a repair lab. HP and Acer are the worst built notebooks ever, this is what this guys tell me

 

[Impulse Fire911]

My first laptop was Toshiba and i never had to reinstall windows on it. EVER its 3 year old laptop. still runs fine....just imagine not having to do tht. my new desktop i built of an ASUS mother board and its great for everything.

 

[pythy]

Where's fujitsu? I've been using mine for 3-4 years now and it still works great, and that's with the old Pentium-M before Intel's dual cores came out.

 

[CoolnQuiet]

That's news? HP sells more notebooks than Asus and Toshiba that's why there are more RMA cases!

 

[shmcphrsn]

After reading through almost all the comments I've got only this to say as an avid builder of Costum PC's as well as repairing the main stream brands, none of you can deny that when you open a dell or hp or even an apple it is chalked full of generic "made in china" parts. And if, i.e.: (If someone puts a secondhand or cheap parts in a car eventually the good parts are going to break down despite who made it, so when these big manufactures use cheap parts along with the good in their Desk/Laptops the conflicting result is a very short shelflife) and for companys like ASUS and Toshiba that stick to using their own stuff and still charging a moderate price for them well I say YEAH!!!

 

[rebturtle]

[citation][nom]g00ey[/nom]What I don't understand is that when people have doubts or thoughts, CAN'T THEY F*ING READ THE MANUAL !?!Here's a quote from the Appendix of the report;That wasn't hard to read now, was it?[/citation]

Do you always have a hard time with reading comprehension? If a "power user" can troubleshoot their own problems, then the unit doesn't go back to anyone, and doesn't get included in the stats. If the "generic user" returns a laptop and it doesn't get repaired/fixed by the retailer (and instead gets RMA'd to the manufacturer or third-party repair facility), then it does get reported to Square Trade. Are you suggesting that Wal-Marts have an in-house IT department that takes care of repairs, because last I saw they just shoved things into boxes and shipped them off for someone else to deal with. Now extremely few people would not return a laptop for too many dead pixels, but I bet nearly everyone reading this knows how to format and reinstall Windows after a file corruption. The average retiree at Wal-Mart, however, is going to go to the customer service desk and say, "It's broken, I want a new one."

 

[gravitygirl]

I have to wonder if there isn't a stronger correlation between how many units a producer ships and how many fail rather than, what this report seems to suggest, some producers actually do a better job at quality production (making good stuff in the first place) or perhaps at quality control (sending back stuff that doesn't test out before it gets to a customer)?

Like someone else already said, pretty much all laptop components are made by the same folks "over there" so am personally skeptical that any one manufacturer is actually getting any better stuff than another.

 

[hannibal]

The fail raits are relative, so the number of sold units does not affect in this. The bigger problem is, like necronic said before, that this is based on release made by company who sells extended guarantee to computer products...
But in anyway it's usefull to know if one brand or another has any production quality problems. We need more statistics from different sources!

 

[Guest]

These appear to be skewed results, not showing the true trend at all. e.g. I have had nothing but trouble with Asus, not once but several things kaput over a three year period including the LC display. Let's face it, many computer products are 'walking wounded' before they even leave the factory due to ESD damage from inadequately trained and grounded staff. I have seen this phenomenon repeatedly, even in top-of-the-range, mega-dollar medical analysers. Standard human nature prevails - no personal responsibility is taken for the products - out of sight, out of mind. So if this survey was to be repeated sampling a different population, the results could easily produce the REVERSE rankings.

 

[gusto51]

One of the most consistently reliable laptop manufacturers wasn’t even included in the survey – Fujitsu, who generally beat everyone on this list.

 

[masterjim]

HP has excellent hardware. They just run hot like the popular brands: Dell,Sony and Apple. That's why there is a market for laptop cooling pads. My HP Pavilion laptop lasted over 4 years. The replacement Acer Aspire is now 3.5 years old and still going strong. I use my laptop like a desktop averaging 3 hours a day on AC power and watch movies and digital TV on it. Acer and Fujitsu tend to run cooler than other brands due to better design with more air ducts and a magnesium alloy chassis. Asus is geared more towards gamers and come with a 2-year warranty. And Lenovo is aimed at business users. Sony and Apple are about style and image in which you pay a premium. According to 3 different technicians at 3 different Notebookshop stores in the Los Angeles area, Dell is the brand that come in most often for repairs. Fujitsu has the fewest repairs/problems with Acer a close second. HP and Toshiba are about average repair-wise.

 

[Guest]

Bought ASUS few month ago...recommended by friend (most computer gig)..with built in fan...blow out all the heat...great application with affordable price...high RAM 8G...and 1tera Memory....LED screen....with superb prices....what more can i say....Credit to my friend...just sold my Macpro...

 

[Guest]

My mom has a Toshiba, and it has not malfunctioned once in the three years that she has had it

 

[simon_p]

From actually working in the repair industry I find it quite laughable at anyone putting Asus to the top of the reliability. They make machines with poor quality components - even the high end gaming laptops they produce have the same flawed DC jack design the low end ones have which is pretty much guaranteed to fail with 2 years of careful use, less if its abused. Don't get me started on the number of Asus desktop boards i've seen fail without warning due to again cheap poor quality components used on them.
HP/Compaq is about right bottom is where they belong, they insist on using hot AMD processors with a hot AMD chipset which inevitably overheats and the solder then breaks on the chipset causing failure of machine to start up. On the older models it was AMD processors with nVidia chipset - same problem. To top it off they put in a cooling system which whilst totally inadequate to start off with gets blocked with dust easily thus further contributing to the overheating issue.

Sony and Dell tend to use better cooling systems and don't have any other inherent generic design faults across all models like HP and Asus. Acer builds cheap and there are some known faults with hinges not being strong enough and breaking away from the base or the lid plastic - this problem also applies to certain HP/Compaq models (G60, G61, G70, G71 come to mind)

Toshiba models are generally reliable but some models do have issues with the DC jack, they tend to be built on the cheap.