"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.
