There is no such thing as a reliable brand of laptop. Every new laptop model is completely redesigned - totally different parts - from the cheapest supplier... Eventually someone is going to buy a capacitor from a company that bought cheap parts and didn't process them properly... before you know it a whole batch of some companies motherboards are going to start failing - and its just a big fat NOBODY KNOWS deal...

The only way to buy a reliable laptop - is to buy a used one - that has been around for at least 2 years so that you can see the proven reports and failure rates from various sites... (heck just go to Ebay and search for Dell 1330 -- you will see that every last one for sale says 'as is graphics card dead' -- and obviously you will know that dell made a big OOPS on designing that model...) -- or you can look up a 10 year old Dell c600 - and see a ton of them for sale for 40 bucks total... perfectly working... (just old as dirt and slow as heck- not to mention outdated) So Dell is a perfect example of a company that has made GREAT - long lasting products - and also a few OOPS models...

EVERY company has OOPS models... (should I repeat that?) -- EVERY company has a model that is a lemon... and nobody knows it is going to be a lemon until about a year after its been selling... because thats when they will start failing...

The ONLY way to be safe when buying a new laptop - is to buy the extended warranty - AND to make weekly backups of your entire hard drive... so if the pc fails - you are not out money... just time.

Now I can list a few models that are reliable - only because I know their design flaws... as I work on a lot of them

And I can list a few that are lemons... but that will not really help you - unless you have specific models you are interested in...

HP dv8000's hold up pretty well - some are single core models - some are core2duo -- some have a problem on the charging circuit for the battery - they have about a 5% failure rate on the first year - a 10% failure rate on the 2nd year - 15% by the 3rd year - unsure beyond that

HP dv9000's have a faulty design on their nvidia graphics chips - only buy one of those if its intel or ATI graphics...

HP dv6000's are a solid little machine - though rather weak...

Toshiba Satelite x205's are holding up pretty well - the SLi models with 2 graphics cards are still very viable now - as long as you get a higher end core2duo (they made them with many many processors... some crap - some great...) I can play crysis2 on my x205 sli1 on medium settings and I get about 30fps -- the laptop is 5 years old now... I'd call that reliable...

Dell xps m1210's are a mixed bag... the intel graphics cards tend to last longer - some of the nvidia 7900 cards have overheated (they are soldiered onto the mobo so thats a bad thing... replacing the whole mobo is required) but that laptop is now... 4 or 5 years old... so they would be reliable I'd think.

Some of the latest laptops - selling for $250 to $350 new - look the same even though they are branded acer/emachine/toshiba/etc... you can tell them because they all have the same flat - generic keyboard and 15.6 inch screen... they are fairly reliable - but have only been in production for 2 years now... they are bottom of the barrel kind of machines - not for gaming...

you really need to say WHAT kind of laptop you need... because - unfortunately - -there is NO RELIABLE BRAND.

I can say - that asus laptops tend to be designed with more thought than some of the others... I rarely see them getting repaired - or being sold for parts... but I have no personal experience owning them and have not looked up any official failure rate information.

Every company keeps track of its models failure rates - with percentages over years on a chart... Getting a copy of those charts takes an act of god... it would be interesting to see them posted more publicly.

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