[hollerith]

The result most surprising to me is that laptops are between 25% and 60% less likely than desktop machines to crash from a hardware fault during the first 30 days worth of measurements.

The much larger weight and volume of desktops would seem to make them easier to cool.

[josephturnip]

That caught my eye too.. perhaps it's because laptops are designed with being carried around in mind? Or, to draw on the other conclusions from the paper, because laptops generally have lower-frequency chips (and for that matter, slower memory and disks too)?

[Zenst]

Laptops also have in effect a cleaner power source with UPS built in so any power glitch's get filtered on a laptop as standard compared to a desktop.

Least I have found desktop's with a good quality PSU and UPS noticable more reliable than those without.

[jseliger]

Laptops also have in effect a cleaner power source with UPS built in so any power glitch's get filtered on a laptop as standard compared to a desktop.

I've heard this theory before but never seen it substantiated. Do you have a link to any research or articles that explains how this works?

[kyberias]

How it works? Laptops have a battery. Hence they are less likely to power off suddenly when mains voltage drops. And powering off suddenly increases the probability of some electronics in the system failing. No need to research, just simple electronics and logic.

[lostlogin]

Pull your laptops power cord out the wall, and plug it back in. Laptop unchanged. Dirty power supply, but laptop unaffected.

[__alexs]

Interesting that they knew that CPU speed resulted in more crashes but didn't test this when it came to laptops vs desktops. If only they had released their data :(