海角大神

Shopping for the right laptop can be tricky. After finding a few with the right balance of power and price, few people go the extra step and ask 鈥渉ow reliable is it?鈥� There are a lot of tiny pieces cramped into those 15-inch shells. And when something goes wrong, repairing it is not exactly a do-it-yourself job.

So, if you鈥檙e in the market for a new laptop, check out these two graphs from the June issue of .

How often do they break?
Consumer Reports complied information on 75,000 laptops, sorted by manufacturer, and looked into how many of them .

Lenovo (IBM) | 20% Fewer Repairs
Compaq | 20
Sony | 21
Toshiba | 21
Dell | 22
HP | 22
Gateway | 22
Apple | 23 More repairs

How helpful is the support?
The magazine surveyed subscribers on laptop manufacturers鈥� . Reader scores are out of 100.

Apple | 83 Better score
Lenovo | 68
Dell | 60
Toshiba | 55
Gateway | 54
Sony | 51
HP | 48 Worse score

So, what do these numbers mean? Consumer Reports says that the first graph shows very little 鈥� a four-point spread is basically a tie 鈥� but the second chart uncovers a .

While Apple received the lowest reliability score, it received top marks in all three support categories: solved problem, waiting on phone, and support staff. Apple got a big leg-up from its in-store , where customers can talk with tech experts face-to-face. In fact, for each manufacturer, in-store troubleshooting provided the best support, according to Consumer Reports 鈥� with success rates hitting 90 percent.

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