Industry-wide, hardware continues to become more reliable, though plenty of room remains for further improvement. "I'm seeing reliability going up quite a bit across the board," says Gartner analyst Leslie Fiering, who has covered PC quality-assurance issues for more than 20 years. Among the factors that have contributed to this trend, she says, are manufacturers' growing recognition that dollars spent up front to make products more reliable will yield back-end savings, thanks to fewer support calls and warranty repairs. Fiering also cites higher-quality motherboards from suppliers and more consolidation of system components.

Laptop PCs--especially corporate models--have become significantly more durable in recent years. In 2004, for instance, the first-year failure rate of business-class notebooks was 20 percent, meaning that 1 in 5 portables had a component that needed to be replaced in its first year. That percentage has since fallen to 12 percent, according to Fiering.

The situation is less rosy on the consumer laptop side, where the failure rate within the first year of ownership runs as high as 50 percent among some makers, according to Fiering. But notebooks that stay plugged in at home or at the office may have a lower failure rate than ones that are carried around in a high-school kid's book bag, for example. Consumer desktop computers, meanwhile, are far more reliable, Fiering says, with failure rates that have remained in the "mid-single digits" for several years.

Motherboards and hard drives still account for the majority of notebook failures; LCD screens and batteries, despite a few isolated incidents, are less likely to cause trouble these days. Anecdotally, few participants in our survey griped about the screens or the batteries on their laptops, but many grumbled about slow system speeds, operating system glitches (particularly in connection with Windows Vista), skimpy amounts of RAM, and diminutive hard drives.

Will falling laptop prices hurt reliability? We're already seeing well-equipped laptops priced at under $500, and some mini-notebooks (or "netbooks") sell for even less. "We could see a situation where there is higher failure at the very low end," says Fiering. She thinks that the bargain laptops of the future may have more external problems than internal ones--that is, problems such as cases breaking or keys falling off.