HP is DEAD LAST for reliability
SquareTrade, a third-party warranty seller, did some interesting statistics on laptops. They studied the failure rates of 30,000 portables. Guess who had the highest malfunction rate of them all?
Source:
http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf
My own experience:
I had a first-gen MacBook Pro. It was aluminum. It was awesome. It lasted 2.5 years. I sold it on Ebay and the next guy who got it actually sent me an email that he was so happy about the condition. After two and a half years of portable use, the thing only got one tiny scratch on the bottom.
I replaced the MacBook Pro with an HP HDX18T laptop because it was cheaper. Big mistake. You know what? It certainly IS cheaper. Everything is worse. Everything feels cheap.
The illuminated keyboard actually makes things
harder to see; how did they pull that off? The entire body is warping anywhere there are hot spots. The bass/treble controls failed on day 4. The volume control failed right after the warranty expired.
They used the wrong trackpad part, so that the artwork didn't match (I have an 18" model and they used the 15" model's trackpad, which is the same size, but has different artwork on it). The trackpad is so smooth it's actually very high friction and grabby if your finger's skin has even the slightest moisture. Multi-finger gestures don't work for a damn. Oh, and Windows fails to recognize the fingerprint reader about 10% of the time on bootup.
When I went to add a second hard drive, I found out you have to buy an adapter. HP doesn't even accept standard 2.5" drives natively, you need to first mount the drive to a tray, then stick the tray in the laptop. And the tray is missing. And you can't buy it from HP; customer support says it's only included if I had bought two hard drives to begin with. So I had to find a tray on Ebay from some guy in Hong Kong who probably stole the parts from an HP factory and then sends it to me on the slow boat from China.
It came loaded with tons of crapware, bloatware, adware, and frankly a lot of stuff that is borderline malware. The HP updater, which is supposed to find updated drivers and software for my laptop, keeps insisting everything is up to date...yet when I go to the driver websites I find updated drivers.
It didn't come with the OS disks. That's right, HP saved 10 damn cents by not including the OS disks, which means I had to spend an hour burning the OS to DVD-Rs and label them with a sharpie. Oh, and the OS included with it? Vista. Do I need to say anything more?
Everything on the MacBook Pro worked, worked better, felt better, lasted the entire time I've had it, and apparently the next owner loves it too. It held an incredible amount of its value. I bought it for around a $1000 and sold it for around $650. My HP laptop is probably worthless, if I can even morally sell it, considering it has so many problems.
I will never, ever, buy another HP portable. Printer maybe, portable no.