What laptop brands are best?

[Angrboda]

Gah! Now I'm pissed with the people in this thread! >

I went out and got an Asus, largely because it was so well liked here (not to mention other sites thought it was great, too). I had the thing for about six months and the hard drive dies on me. I had to send it to Asus to get it fixed and that was about two weeks ago. Crazy thing is, before I got my Asus, I had a Dell. Everyone said Dell was junk, but my Dell laptop was still running (although it got stolen after I lent it to a friend). My Dell lasted longer than my Asus!

Asus makes good stuff, generally. Their only downside is that their after sales support has gone down the tubes over the past few years. I haven't kept up on things over the past years, but I haven't heard the things you claim to be hearing about Dell. It's true that Dell consumer crap is just about as bad as HP and so on, but Dell business laptops are or were very respectable.



(And Asus may not be as good as they were in their halcyon days. I bought an Asus motherboard for my file server 6 years ago and went through two samples of the first one that simply wouldn't run; I ended up switching to another board, but that still BSODs a few times a year. But that may just be the grade of the hardware. If I wanted better reliability, I would have bought an intel based server board instead of consumer AMD crap, but it's what I could afford at the time. [SLI solutions were still the exception rather than the norm, and I needed a 4x PCIE slot for the controller.])

(ETA: Hardware failure follows what is known as a bathtub curve, being that there is a high rate of failure during the beginning of the lifespan of a device, dropping off rapidly, followed by a long period of low failure rates until the hardware gets rather old, at which point failure rates start to climb fairly steeply, though not as steeply as the initial period decreased [thus the name, 'bathtub curve']. By six months, most hardware should be relatively stable — the bulk of early failures occur in the first 60-90 days. However, the simple fact is that even high quality hardware fails, and in particular, laptops tend to push hardware to its limits more than other platforms [likely a combination of high heat and being turned on and off frequently, in addition to being marginally spec'd to begin with; 'thermal stress' — the stress to a part that occurs from a rapid change in temperature, primarily from being turned on, is the main cause of electronic failures in computer hardware. A couple other statistics, just for the heck of it. 80% of hard disk failures occur in the electronics of the drive, not the mechanical parts, and, 80% of hard drives returned for repair have nothing wrong with them. [not implying anything in your case, just interesting info]].)