PC failure rates better but notebooks still outrageous

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 28 June 2006 05:40

Your IT - Home IT

PC vendors have reduced hardware annual failure rates by approximately 25% in the past two years, but 15% of notebooks break down in the first year and nearly a quarter of notebooks owners will have to replace them after three years, according to a new benchmark study.

The new study from research group Gartner had good and bad news. While the good news is that desktop PC and notebook PC hardware failures have declined, the bad news is that notebook failures still range from 15% to 20% throughout the life of the system. Three years ago, notebook failures averaged 20% in the first year, climbing to 28% in the third year. Desktop failures have gone from 7% in year 1 and 15% in the fourth year of life to a current level of 5% in year 1 with an anticipated 12% in the fourth year.

The continued unreliability of notebooks is reflected in the fact that few vendors will back their products with more than a 12 month warranty as standard. Unless the notebook is a high-end model, users usually have to factor in the cost of an extended three year warranty into the price.

“Users need to track their PC failure rates to spot problems and hold their PC suppliers accountable,” said Leslie Fiering, research vice president at Gartner. “Once chief financial officers (CFOs) become aware of PC failure rates, especially in enterprises that purchase thousands of PC each year, there will be extra pressure placed on chief information officers (CIOs) to spot problems and hold their PC supplier responsible. CFOs will want assurances that the equipment they finance is not going to result in downtime for their employees.”

Gartner defines a hardware failure as any repair incident that requires a hardware component to be replaced. The component can be as trivial as a notebook latch or as significant as a motherboard. The general pattern is for newly purchased systems to have an early shakeout period with high failure rates that drop back to lower levels after 60 to 90 days.

There are no publicly available PC hardware reliability figures because PC vendors consider the information proprietary and will not disclose it. However, many PC vendors and warranty repair providers have shared the information with Gartner off the record during the past several years. Gartner has cross-checked this input against feedback of Gartner clients, many of whom manage installed bases of 50,000 or more units.

For desktop systems, motherboards and hard drives are the two largest sources of failures. “The number of motherboard replacements has been rising over time as more components get integrated onboard,” Ms Fiering said. “Parts such as network interface cards (NICs) or modems can no longer be swapped out as separate parts. If either of these fails, an entire motherboard swap is required.”

“For notebooks, screen breakage used to be the single-largest source of failure,” said Ms Fiering. “However, over time, notebook manufacturers have improved design significantly to reduce screen breakage by adding structural rigidity to the notebook casing and screen bezel, as well as by providing a greater clearance between the screen and the keyboard when the system is closed.”

Currently, the top sources of notebook failures on systems less than two years old are:

· Motherboards and hard drives (tied for first place, each ranging between 25% and 45% of total hardware failures)

· Chassis, including latches, hinges, feet and case cracks

· Keyboards, with keycaps falling off or getting discolored, and spilled drinks seeping under the keyboard

· Screens

Some measures that the smartest PC vendors have implemented to improve reliability include: increasing design and system testing; increasing component qualification; raising the penalty to component suppliers for component failures; and performing overall system tests during repair incidents to spot and fix any imminent problems before they can cause further failures.

Some of the steps users can employ to reduce failure rates include: performing due diligence on PC vendor quality assurance programs and annual failure rates as part of the vendor selection process; verifying the PC vendor’s escalation and problem resolution processes; checking with PC vendor reference accounts on reliability; and establishing query and reporting capabilities within internal help desk, asset management and support systems to extract hardware failure rate data by model and failure type.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report “Benchmarking PC Hardware Reliability." The report provides detailed analysis on PC failure rates, as well as advice for both vendors and users to improve/reduce these failure rates. The report is available on Gartner’s Web site at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=493252.