According to Gartner, your laptop has a much greater chance of breaking than your desktop. They estimate that 5% of new desktops will break within 12 months compared with 15% of laptops. Within 4 years, 12% of desktops will break compared with 22% of laptops.

The main cause of broken laptops used to be broken screens but now, the culprit seems to be the motherboard and its integrated parts - and that’s requiring technicians to replace the entire motherboard to fix one component that goes bad.

That’s what happened to my last laptop, a Sony Vaio (GRX550), which worked fine until just after the 2 year warenty expired. The computer was equipped with two RAM slots, and one day, for no apparent reason, one of the slots just stopped working. Whenever RAM was inserted into the malfunctioning slot, the computer wouldn’t even turn on. But if you only had RAM in the working slot, it worked just fine (abite with half the RAM, so it was somewhat slower).

The solution offered was that I could replace the motherboard, which would have been a few hundred dollars. I opted for buying a new, lighter laptop with more battery power instead - a Dell Inspiron 700m.

Other reasons laptops break - problems with “latches and hinges on the chassis, lost key caps and the aftermath of drinks spilled on the keyboard.”

Source: CIO Magazine (August 15, 2006) “Don’t Be Surprised When Your Laptop Breaks”