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. "Ho

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 mac