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A recent laptop reliability survey about three year malfunction rates by manufacturer has come out according to the PC warranty providers SquareTrade. SquareTrade randomly selected over 30,000 laptops and netbooks for the study. Acer, Apple, Asus, Dell, Gateway, HP, Lenovo, Sony, and Toshiba all had at least one thousand laptops each within that sample group.

The result shows that the Asus and Toshiba are the most reliable latops which took the No.1 and No.2 spot. Asus and Toshiba came out on top to become the most reliable manufacturers, with fewer than 16 percent having a hardware malfunction over three years. The following laptop is Sony, while the Apple was just taking the No.4 spot. Behind them are Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Gateway , HP and Hewlett-Packard which came in at No.5 to No.10.

According to the report, there are 31 percent of laptops fail completely within three years of purchase which contains hardware malfunctions and accidental problems. Of these failures, hardware fault is up to 20.4% while the accidental problems just account for 10.6%. The report showed that netbooks’s malfunctions will have a 20% rate which is higher than the entry-level laptops and the high-end laptops with just 21% and 18%.

“It’s not really surprising that Apple’s in the middle of the pack,” said Vince Tseng, the vice president of marketing at SquareTrade. “What was surprising was that Asus came out on top.”

According to SquareTrade’s data, Apple netbooks priced ess than $400 has a higher fail rate of 23% than that priced between $400 and $1,000, and higher than the notebooks that cost more than $1,000 at the rate of 38%.

While in the first year, all notebooks just have 4.7% failed with the hardware malfunction and 12.7% in the second year and 20.4% by the time of 3 years.

“It’s just a guess, but one explanation for the higher failure rate of netbooks is that the components are typically cheaper,” Tseng said when asked why netbooks failed at a higher rate than more expensive notebooks. “Early on, when component costs were fairly high for netbook makers because of their low volume, they were taking the lowest bidder on components.”

Asus is the best on malfunction rates with 15.6 percent, Apple just standed on the fourth spot with 17.4 percent, while HP performed the worst with 25.6 percent of laptops malfunctioning within three years.

People who purchase the laptop without taking these into consideration will have a new opinion about these laptops.