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Asus pulps Apple in hardware reliability survey

But the real success was Lenovo

Asus has stolen the top spot from Apple in a report that assesses the reliability of top PC manufacturer’s machines.

Put together by US PC repair and support firm Rescuecom, the league table was topped by Asus with a whopping 972 reliability points. Apple, now in second place, scored just 324 points.

Rescuecom’s scores are derived from 15,000 support calls made to the company during Q4 2008 and how those calls are divided among the major PC brands. It also takes into account the quarterly US market share of each PC supplier – figures Rescuecom takes from market watcher IDC.

For example, Asus had a 1.6 per cent Q4 market share, but only 0.2 per cent of calls to Rescuecom’s call centre were about Asus PCs. By contrast, Apple had a 6.8 per cent market share, but 2.1 per cent of call centre calls were about firm’s PCs.

In Rescuecom’s previous version of the report, an annual survey published back in December, Apple scored 700. Asus didn’t feature.

But the real winner is Lenovo, which scored 348 points this time around, just ahead of Apple's 324 points. Asus' score was massively boosted by a sudden surge in sales toward the end of the year, driven by sales of the Eee PC 1000 series, Rescuecom told Register Hardware.

For this reason, David Milman, Rescuecom's CEO, said that Asus’ reliability score should be “taken with a grain of salt”. In other words, its score was something of a 'statistical anomaly'. Not so Lenovo's and for that reason the ThinkPad maker was awarded joint first place with Asus, despite the big differences in their scores.

Toshiba’s score dropped from 299 points in the December version of the report, to 172 points this time around – based on a market share of 5.8 per cent and call centre proportion of 3.4 per cent.

Acer sits just below Toshiba with 151 points. It didn’t feature on Rescuecom’s last report, but the support firm added that – in this latest version - eight per cent of calls received during the quarter were about Acer machines and that it had a 12 per cent market share.

Although HP had a 15.3 per cent market share during Q1, Rescuecom awarded the firm just 142 points – a drop of 42 points from the previous report. Unsurprisingly, the highest percentage of support calls – 17.9 per cent – was about HP machines. ®

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