http://www.squaretrade.com/pages/laptop-reliability-1109/
If there is one thing I try to tell people is that laptops fail all the time. Remember to do a good back up if you have a laptop. Take a moment to read a study from Square trade linked above. "Failure rates for over 30,000 new laptop computers" And "one-third of all laptops will fail within 3 years." "Netbooks are projected to have a 20% higher failure rate from hardware malfunctions than more expensive laptop computers." Take a moment to read the PDF. I was shocked to find that Toshiba had a very low failure rate.