EDITOR’S CHOICE: Back in the bad old days when American car manufacturers were outsmarting themselves right out of business, they called it “planned obsolescence.” That meant building products that were designed to fail on schedule in order to create automatic demand for replacement models. Now laptop manufacturers are on board --  and if you buy an HP it is guaranteed to fail a quarter of the time within three years.

Extended warranty provider SquareTrade has just concluded a survey of laptop and notebook manufacturers and says that Asus and Toshiba notebooks are the most reliable -- .and Acer, Gateway, and HP notebooks are among the biggest duds.

HP IS LAST: The independent firm tracked more than 30,000 machines and the results are a little surprising. Computer makers Asus (Taiwan) and Toshiba (Japan) led the pack in terms of notebook system reliability, with fewer than 10 percent of their systems needing repair after two years and with three-year failure rate projections of about 15.6 and 15.7 percent (respectively). And who’s in last place? Top computer maker Hewlett-Packard, with more than 15 percent of its systems failing after two years, and a three-year projection forecasting over a quarter of them will fail in three years.

“While our study found notebook malfunction rates to be trending 20 percent higher than more expensive laptops, the variance between manufacturer is far greater and should be a bigger factor in making a buying decision,” SquareTrade wrote in its report. “Asus and Toshiba laptops failed just over half as frequently as HP, which makes them a solid bet in terms of reliability.”

HARDWARE: Overall, SquareTrade reports that 31 percent of all notebook owners reported a failure to SquareTrade; about two thirds of that failure was hardware malfunctions, while the remaining third of the failures were reported as accidental damage. Unsurprisingly, SquareTrade finds inexpensive net books have higher failure rates than more mainstream laptop computers -- and premium systems have lower failure rates still.

After a year, some 5.8 percent of net books had a malfunction, compared to 4.7 percent of mainstream notebooks and 4.2 percent of premium laptops -- that makes the failure rate for net books more than 20 percent higher than entry-level mainstream notebooks and 40 percent higher than premium machines. However, SquareTrade does note that net books haven’t been on the market very long, so the repair and problem data is still inconclusive.

WARRANTIES: SquareTrade is in the business of offering independent warranties to consumers. To produce this data, SquareTrade tracked failure rates for computers covered by SquareTrade warranty plans. Although that sample set is self-selecting -- there’s no way of knowing how representative SquareTrade customers are of everyday computer users -- the data does suggest significant variations in reliability among computer manufacturers -- or significant variations among the way SquareTrade customers select and use different manufacturers’ products.

APPLE? And what about industry darling Apple? SquareTrade ranked them number four behind Asus, Toshiba, and Sony, with a two-year failure rate a little over 10 percent and a projected three-year failure rate of 17.4 percent. That is above average; but barely. The report noted that this was a rough projection, and that notebooks have a 25.1% malfunction rate, entry-level laptops to have a rate of 20.6%, and premium laptops to have the lowest rate at 18.1%.

“To many consumers, an extra 1 in 20 chance of having a net book fail is probably not going to be a deal breaker, as there are many factors other than reliability that should considered, it said. “But it is something to think about, especially given the lack of concrete data on net book reliability beyond the first 12 months.”

BY MANUFACTURER: The Square Trade analysis included 9 brands of laptop manufacturers, with a minimum of 1000 units, which was enough to provide a significant look at the 2 year failure rates excluding accidental damage.

Laptop reliability, by manufacturer, 2 year-3 year projection: ASUS and Toshiba come out on top. With 3-year malfunction rates forecast to be under 16%, laptops from these two manufacturers are nearly 40% more reliable than Hewlett-Packard, the worst performer in the study. Sony and Apple also performed better than the average.

The industry leader HP, which shipped nearly 16 million laptops in the past year ranked dead last in our reliability study with over one-fourth of laptops expected to malfunction in 3 years. Many experts attribute that to the shift of manufacturing to China, and the failure to adequately transfer quality control along with production.

Gateway and Acer (Taiwan), the #2 maker of laptops, were also nearly as unreliable as HP, with an expected malfunction rate of over 23%. In order of reliability the top nine are: Asus, Toshiba, Sony, Apple, Dell, Lenovo (formerly IBM, now Chinese), Acer, Gateway, and HP.

FAILURE RATES: Conclusions on laptop reliability: Given the high overall failure rates of laptops and sizeable difference in reliability by brand, reliability should be a concern for consumers shopping around for the best holiday deals.

While the study found net book malfunction rates to be trending 20% higher than more expensive laptops, the variance between manufacturers is far greater and should be a bigger factor in making a buying decision. ASUS and Toshiba laptops failed just over half as frequently as HP, which makes them a solid bet in terms of reliability.

Given that net books have only really been around in volume for about 12 months, it will be interesting to see how their reliability plays out over the course of the next 12 months. SquareTrade will continue to monitor the progress and publish an update of laptop and net book failure rates in 2010.