Asus tops notebook reliability league

Study finds Asus and Toshiba have lowest three-year malfunction rate

SquareTrade has claimed that Asus laptops are most reliable

Asus has finished top and HP bottom of a study analysing the reliability of nine laptop brands.

Warranty provider SquareTrade analysed the failure rate of more than 30,000 new notebooks covered by its warranty plans and found that a third will fail within three years.

Two-thirds of those failures are due to hardware malfunctions with the remainder attributable to accidental damage.

However, SquareTrade said there was a large variance between vendors.

Asus and Toshiba finished top of the pile with three-year malfunction rates of 15.6 and 15.7 per cent respectively. They were both nearly 40 per cent more reliable than larger rival HP, which languished on 25.6 per cent.

Apple, Dell and Lenovo finished in the middle with malfunction rates of 16.8, 17.4 and 18.3 per cent respectively. Acer and Gateway were nearly as unreliable as HP with malfunction rates of 23.3 and 23.5 per cent respectively.

SquareTrade’s study found that fewer than five per cent of laptops fail from malfunctions in the first year with an additional eight per cent failing in each of the subsequent years. However, the 31 per cent failure rate is still high for the consumer electronics industry, which SquareTrade put down to the relative sophistication of laptop components.