3 Year Laptop Malfunction Rate by Manufacturer

[lilo777]

And I work with HP laptops and desktops on a daily basis so I can tell you that their failure and glitch rate is absurd (this is just one brand, I know). We tested 5 of the new 17 inch Envys which are supposed to be high end for their consumer line and they all exhibited issues including BSODs, trackpad causing the cursor to jump randomly and often, and severe heat issues under light load. Oh and battery life was awful just browsing the web and stuff (I think we got 1.5 hours). We ended up ordering a maxed out 17" MBP for one guy and will boot camp it because it happens to be a reliable and powerful machine (he had one before, just needs more power) with decent battery life.

HP's non-workstation class desktops are equally bad and is why we only order workstation desktops even for HR and others that don't need the power. We do it for reliability.

We are considering Lenovo because the noteobooks they make that we do order quite a lot of (about 20 t410s in the past 2 months) have been excellent. So we are demoing their t701ds w/quadro 3800 to see if our engineers like them. And we may switch to their desktops as well if we think they can keep up with our volume.

Probably 70% of our (admittedly small for the size of the company and number of users) IT team uses Macs (mostly MBPs) for the hardware and about the same % of us that do use OS X.

It looks like you tried hard to find problems in those HP notebooks I work for a company where we have thousands (literally) HP Elitebooks. I am not in IT so I do not know any stats but I am not aware of any of my colleagues experiencing any issues. As far as battery life is concerned... you must be kidding. These are mobile workstations with very serious horse power (way more powerful than MBPs). They are not supposed to have long battery life and who would need it for office use?

 

[gonnabuyamacbsh]

It looks like you tried hard to find problems in those HP notebooks I work for a company where we have thousands (literally) HP Elitebooks. I am not in IT so I do not know any stats but I am not aware of any of my colleagues experiencing any issues. As far as battery life is concerned... you must be kidding. These are mobile workstations with very serious horse power (way more powerful than MBPs). They are not supposed to have long battery life and who would need it for office use?

I think the elitebook may very well be there only good machine though. my brother has an elitebook 8440w and that thing is how all laptops should be imo. the screen was spectacular, perfect viewing angles from every direction. gaming was superb, he plays quite a few games on high settings. keyboard and touchpad were surprisingly decent for a windows machine. as with keyboard and touchpads, apple is and will always stay king . his job payed like $3000 for it though. I'd rather stick with my $1100 13"mbp and be happy

 

[lilo777]

I think the elitebook may very well be there only good machine though. my brother has an elitebook 8440w and that thing is how all laptops should be imo. the screen was spectacular, perfect viewing angles from every direction. gaming was superb, he plays quite a few games on high settings. keyboard and touchpad were surprisingly decent for a windows machine. as with keyboard and touchpads, apple is and will always stay king . his job payed like $3000 for it though. I'd rather stick with my $1100 13"mbp and be happy

This is how we use our Elitebooks: come to work, stick laptop into docking station which already has keyboard, mouse and large monitor (or two) connected to it. Work. Once in a while, take the laptop to a meeting. Even during the meetings many people use mice instead of touchpads. All conference rooms are equipped with power outlets so battery life is not an issue.

The funny thing is that except for MS Office stuff (which is used primarily by managers) we mostly use notebooks for running VNC viewer which connects to a VNC server running on a server (Linux machine).

 

[Looon]

Proof that just because you paid double for your mac doesn't mean you're getting anything better hardware wise

 

[hakuryuu]

It looks like you tried hard to find problems in those HP notebooks I work for a company where we have thousands (literally) HP Elitebooks. I am not in IT so I do not know any stats but I am not aware of any of my colleagues experiencing any issues. As far as battery life is concerned... you must be kidding. These are mobile workstations with very serious horse power (way more powerful than MBPs). They are not supposed to have long battery life and who would need it for office use?

And some people need that battery life to be better than 1-1.5 hours. Like it or not. There is a reason we were looking at the consumer Envy line and not the elitebooks for people who needed a little battery life. Obviously no one cares about desk use, but they are supposed to be moderately capable of portability especially when not using that horsepower. The MBP would fare no/not much better under heavy load than they do.

The versions previous to the 8740w were not nearly as bad from a reliability standpoint either. Most of these rarely leave their docks and yet they have had a variety of issues. We haven't had as many issues with the 8530/40p.

Maybe its all stupid user tricks causing the issues or that they're all running dual display with 30 and 24 inch monitors causing heat. But we have the HP reps coming soon and my bosses are going to be giving them a bit of a reaming over quality. Its been bad enough since before I joined the company that our CIO (who gets a lot of stuff from HP for us to play with long before it is released) considered going to Dell. We are having CDW test all our machines before shipping (something HP doesn't really do but Dell does). Its not just myself that sees the issues or complains about them.

 

[JKK photography]

I just had an HP laptop take a nose-dive today with a dead motherboard, so I may be a bit biased at the moment.

 

[neondrgns]

And some people need that battery life to be better than 1-1.5 hours. Like it or not. There is a reason we were looking at the consumer Envy line and not the elitebooks for people who needed a little battery life. Obviously no one cares about desk use, but they are supposed to be moderately capable of portability especially when not using that horsepower. The MBP would fare no/not much better under heavy load than they do.

The versions previous to the 8740w were not nearly as bad from a reliability standpoint either. Most of these rarely leave their docks and yet they have had a variety of issues. We haven't had as many issues with the 8530/40p.

Maybe its all stupid user tricks causing the issues or that they're all running dual display with 30 and 24 inch monitors causing heat. But we have the HP reps coming soon and my bosses are going to be giving them a bit of a reaming over quality. Its been bad enough since before I joined the company that our CIO (who gets a lot of stuff from HP for us to play with long before it is released) considered going to Dell. We are having CDW test all our machines before shipping (something HP doesn't really do but Dell does). Its not just myself that sees the issues or complains about them.

What kind of company buys envies for battery life? they are meant to be power houses. I think you guys got it backwards, elite books have a better battery life especially with the extended batteries these batteries are made for companies that need them like yours. Back in 2008 they broke 24 hour use with those batteries. You just have to configure it right and not add in desktop processors in a laptop. I hope you guys aren't in the tech industry because just "not using the horsepower" doesn't mean your computer doesn't draw power. Why even get a power computer if you are running on battery? No one runs anything intensive on battery. Battery life on a macbook pro isn't even a steady 7 hours, its more like 1.5 hours if I do anything intensive.



also what the hell 17" envies for portability and battery life? their 17" line is practically a desktop replacement, get an ultra portable for portability. They even have a section marked "Ultra Portable." They even state on their website that the 17" line gets 2.5 hours of battery life under ideal situations. And you do realize that that means it probably gets maybe 1 hour real world. Apple touts what like 7-10 hours? Tech review sites have all stated that the macbook pros with their touted 7-10 hours pretty much under real world scenarios get 4 maybe 5 hours. And the important part is "real world scenario."

BSODs, Cursor jumping around randomly, Low battery life. These are your stated problems.
Congratulations you just found out what is wrong with Windows not with your laptops.
I am a huge fan of windows 7, but I have all of those problems because it is unfortunately the price you pay for using Windows ( and I think its worth it). I am bootcamping Windows 7 on an 15" i7 MBP, and I have random ass cursor jumping cause of the stupid novelty sized trackpad. This I have no clue what causes this, but I wrote about my theor that the designers didnt take into account where my palms touch the track pad at the upper right and left hand corners and this causes the cursor jumping. Also MBP running windows gets maybe 2.5-3 hours of battery just browsing the internet. This is because the power saving options like dimming your screen when not in use in an OSX feature that is not in Windows. Also there is no dual graphics card power saving option here, it runs using the nvidia card all the time. This is also because Apple doesnt care and wont fix it.

 

[tigress666]

Judging from my experiences with my previous 2007 MB and now my 2010 MBP (which already has a broken key and apparently the trackpad has an issue that is known enough I mentioned it and the genius didn't even have to look at it to believe me that it was there), I totally believe it.

I love my MBP (and I loved my MB), but quality (as in not having issues) wise I think is a huge weak point. None of my previous Macs had near as many issues (and the worst one before that took three years before an issue popped up). My one PC also didn't seem to have as many issues. Admittedly those were all desktops, but it still seems disappointing when my MB could only last a little over a year (literally within a month of the warranty expiring) without the hard drive dieing and current computer is 6 months old and already has issues.

 

[hakuryuu]

I hope you guys aren't in the tech industry because just "not using the horsepower" doesn't mean your computer doesn't draw power. Why even get a power computer if you are running on battery? No one runs anything intensive on battery. Battery life on a macbook pro isn't even a steady 7 hours, its more like 1.5 hours if I do anything intensive.

Since my MBP 17 gets about 5, maybe 6 hours under light load (web browsing, office work, 60% brightness) I would say that not using the horsepower does mean not drawing as much power (I thought that was pretty well understood). Anyone that actually gets Apple's stated battery life isn't doing much and must be doing it in a dim room so they can see whats on screen.

We aren't buying them to be ultraportables and we don't buy them for battery life. And if someone needs a laptop for portability we get the appropriate laptop (t410s/x201), but the ability to go away from your desk without a power brick is the purpose of having a laptop in the first place and if you aren't doing something intensive (what one might call "ideal conditions") it should last a decent amount of time. Maybe I am spoiled by a 17 inch that does actually allow me to do that.

And we design, build and launch rockets. Most of our work is done on desktop workstations as I stated before but our engineers and a variety of people have laptops they take home or travel with (though most just leave them docked at their desk making me wonder why they have laptops anyways). I don't even monitor the battery life people get on the Elitebooks because the Quadro 3800 eats it alive. We were merely hoping something a little lower powered would be better for those that don't need the Quadro and came away disappointed about everything but the performance.