How prone is your laptop to failure?

From time to time I get asked by a colleague on which laptop they should buy?  Perhaps it's for themselves or their son or daughter that they will be shipping off to school?  I try to give them an honest answer on the information that I have garnered over the years.  You know,  if you stick with a brand name you can't go wrong.   Or be careful of the ones on sale for that, too good to be true price, because it usually is.

One of the blogs that I subscribe to, LifeHacker has an interesting little study on the reliability of laptops by manufacturer.  The study was done by SquareTrade.

SquareTrade analyzed failure rates for over 30,000 new laptop computers covered by SquareTrade Laptop Warranty plans and found that one-third of all laptops will fail within 3 years. SquareTrade also found that netbooks are 20% more unreliable than other laptops, and that Asus and Toshiba are the most reliable laptop brands.
You can download the PDF report the full report here.