Looking at 3-year trends, SquareTrade, an extended warranty company, has published a report on failure rates for laptop and netbook computers. The report covers hardware failures and accident-damage separately so it's easy who's making the more reliable computers.
Here's a chart of the top ten brands listed in order of relability. Using their own actuarial data, SquareTrade, has actual numbers for failures within 2-years of purchase and then has projected a 3-year trend, 
This is pretty disheartening for the HP/Compaq lines and for the Acer/Gateway group too. Just going on the 2-year numbers, one in 6 or so is going to have a failure by year two. On the better end of the line, it's still a bit of a surprise that one in 10 will have a fault in two years. Shouldn't that be more like one in 25 or 50? A laptop should work for two years, shouldn't it?
A couple of surprises here: from my own anectotal experience as a local computer guy, I would have expected to see Toshiba and Acer switch places. My experience has been that the Acer's are usually more reliable than the Toshiba's for the last several years. Guess I'll have to look again at Toshiba.
A point of interest in the dataset is that netbooks don't seem to be as robust as notebooks. In fact, the chart belows seems to be saying that, across the board, the more a portable computer costs, the better chance it has to work without failure. Netbooks, though seem to have a distinct disadvantage.
I'm not sure if the laptop makers will agree, but this report is a great service for laptop shoppers. Hopefully it will help set some new goals for laptop makers too.
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