Another laptop died this month. It was an MSI budget laptop bought in 2008, when 25k pesos was the budget price for laptops. Last year, its two twin sisters died the same way. Motherboard deaths.
Two years is't really good enough for laptops, considering some of our desktops are from more than 5 years back and still running fast under Linux. My very first laptop, a Compaq, got a broken back (LCD problem) after 3 years, but reached 5 years before its adaptor gave up. It would have still been fixable, but I was only using it as a fax server by then.
So now, I'm holding off from buying MSI notebooks for the time being. Before it was Neo's when my most expensive laptop died of heat stroke in just over a year. Then it was Toshiba's. It lived but a year. It was intended for my dad, but he never got to use it all. That one, we bought in the States, only to find out it was made in the Philippines. Not that there's a problem with that, of course. It was just funny, sort of.
Since then, when people ask me what's a durable laptop, I always say there aren't any. They all go down their death spiral the moment you buy them. That's half-serious. I encourage people to buy just what they need, and not more. If you're getting one for business apps like openoffice/libre office + email/internet, you'll be just fine and dandy with a 20k laptop. If you just want to stay connected so you can twitter your breakfast, a netbook worth 11k is quite good enough (until the battery runs out).
Brands don't matter much nowadays. Right now, I'm into emachines. I have now 10 or more emachines laptops in our company. The time I get too many hardware problems and premature deaths with them, I'll have to review my choices.
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