[ChrisNorstrom]

I'm having a hard time coming to terms with "Laptops less likely to crash from hardware fault than desktops"

Everything we've learned from experience, surveys, and PC World magazines has showed the opposite. Heat kills hardware and laptops have their hardware packed together so closely that it generates lots of heat. Back then I remember reading something like 1 in 4 laptops fail in the first 3 years. Which was very believable, at the time I was in collage for game design & development. All 80 guys in our class had laptops from HP (with get this... Pentium 4s in them). Those laptops had a LOT of problems. They were basically portable heaters.

So I guess laptops now have either much better cooling, much cooler CPUs or a combination. OR PCs are just terribly cooled.

[Lagged2Death]

This analysis is making a very specific measurement. They're only counting software crashes that are detected and reported in Windows logs.

If a machine crashes so severely that a crash report is not generated, than those reports will not be present in our data. Therefore, our analysis can be considered conservative...

"Conservative" here means "it underestimates the crash rate by some unknowable amount."

If you drop your laptop down a flight of stairs, it will likely develop some hardware problems. But for one thing, not all hardware failures will cause software crashes and crash reports. For another thing, you're likely to just replace the drop-kicked laptop, and the hardware failures will never appear in logs like these.

[mertd]

Here is the authors' hypothesis:

We hypothesize that the durability features built into laptops (such as motion-robust hard drives) make these machines more robust to failures in general. Perhaps the physical environment of a home or of- fice is not much gentler to a computer as the difference in engineering warrants.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Just a theory, but perhaps laptops have a shorter lifespan in general?

[mrb]

No. They only took into account the machines' first 30 days of service life:

"we only count failures within the first 30 days of TACT (total accumulated computing time), for machines with at least 30 days of TACT."

[dkarl]

That's an interesting point. Laptops get replaced faster, and when a laptop is replaced, it is typically left in a non-running state in which it will not experience or report errors. Desktops are often left running for months or years after they've been replaced, either through laziness or because of a desire to keep them around for a special purpose.