miker47

Brian, Brings back memories of Bill Lambeer and the"bad boys" from the mid-80s. From your picture I'm guessing you might be too young to remember the "good old days."

I need to correct what I said. The data was both left and right censored. Left by rejecting any machine that didn't last at least 100 hours of use and right censored because we stopped looking after 3700 hours of use.

"Wow, what type of "shop" buys quantities from different manufactures? Seems it would be better (read cheaper) to buy all from the same brand, large volume discount comes to mind." A shop in the midst of several different purchasing orgs, each buying 2-10,000 machines on a variety of budgets and with a variety of different requirement sets and installation schedules. "I have found a 1-5 fps difference just in Mobo's from different makers with similar parts, ram, hd size,cpu speed." I must confess I have no idea what a "1-5 fps difference" has to do with laptop reliability. "How many months of data were collected to determine their reliability? 300 computers each with 50 hours is not the same as 1 computer with 15,000 hours." We calculated the probability of failure, median time to failure etc. during the first 1800 hrs of use following the first 100 hours, and during the second 1800 hours. At that point we stopped collecting data and so our data was right-censored. The numbers of computers involved was several hundred for each of the brands I listed earlier. Performance monitoring was done largely with in house software and done on much smaller data samples than those I mentioned above. BTW, I've got a couple machines at home (out of 6-7) that each has about 15,000 hours on them (never seen a laptop with 15,000 though.) Now I suggest the thread drift back to Terence's problem.

Terence, Not so long ago I monitored performance data in a shop with several hundred each of Compaqs, Dells, IBMs and Toshibas. Not a nickles worth of difference between the brands regarding reliability. Usually when a machine crashes a simple reboot will fix it. I'm wondering about why you needed to reformat/reload. If the hard-drive itself was damaged, but not inoperable, then a reformat/reload might be necessary to isolate the damaged sectors (assuming the damaged sectors contained critical os files). If that has happened several times in a year perhaps you do have a dud, or the machine is being stressed by environmental or usage factors. Even if the machine is out of warranty I suggest talking with Compaq, sometimes a tech can give you some diagnostic help, even if the company won't make good on a defect.