Acer senior product manager Ray Sawall disagrees. "Sub-$500 netbooks and notebooks have not been achieved through cutting corners on reliability and quality," he says. "These price points have been realized through price reductions in key commodities such as displays, memory, and hard drives." Sawall points to portable DVD players, many of them equipped with 8.9-inch LCD screens, to illustrate his point. As sales of these players increased, the manufacturing costs of smaller LCD panels fell. "As a result, the sub-$400 netbook became a reality, where it was not possible for most of 2007," he adds.

Though PC reliability is improving, the personal computer is still the worst troublemaker in consumer electronics. With its multiple hardware components and software applications, its fragile moving parts, and its jack-of-all-trades complexity, the PC is a support nightmare waiting to happen. In our survey, roughly a third of desktop and notebook PC users who participated reported one or more significant problems with their PC's hardware or software. Next most vexatious is the printer: Less than 30 percent of printer owners had one or more problems, followed by about a quarter of router users, a sixth of MP3 player owners, and an eighth of digital camera users. The technology research firm IDC recently completed a large study whose results tally with ours. The study looked at support issues for 14 consumer electronics devices, including the 6 included in our survey. "Of those 14 devices, desktops and laptops clearly had the most support issues," says IDC research manager Matt Healey, who coauthored the report.

Printers can be a problem too. "There are some unique situations with printers," says Jodi Schilling, HP's vice president of customer support operations for North America. New and updated operating systems are notorious for garbling software drivers and making printers inoperable; and the sheet-feeding design of some models can be a nuisance.

Jim Lee of Naperville, Illinois, owns a Lexmark inkjet printer, but he says that he has never cared much for the printer's design. "It's really an awkward machine to use," he explains. "Occasionally it'll feed two sheets instead of one, so you'll get a blank one stuck on the back of yours. That seems to be a quirk of the machine that we just had to learn to live with." Lee recently bought a newer HP Officejet printer, which he says handles paper much better than the Lexmark does.

Make It Easy to Use--and Reliable