At this point we ought to mention statistics. Statisticians may wonder why we don't test a large number of each product and then average the results. Well, we could, if vendors were willing to deliver lorryloads of each system under test, labs space were 10 times greater and we employed an army of labs staff. Instead, we assume one system will be exactly the same as any other of the same model from the same manufacturer, and you might think that this would be the case. Despite this, we have seen some review systems that seem to have bypassed all quality controls, despite the vendors' claims that the systems came straight from their production lines.
Reliability is almost impossible to quantify within the brief period most products are in our labs.
However, PC hardware is pretty reliable these days, and it's fairly safe to assume that it will last for the typical three-year PC life cycle if it doesn't fail immediately. That said, IT managers should always carry out extensive testing of hardware before investing heavily in it, and that should show up any problems. The same can't be said for software. The vast majority of problems with PCs turn out to be caused by incorrect settings in the Bios or the operating system itself, or more often, because of some unexpected interaction between one piece of software and another. Greater automatic discovery of settings is what's needed, as well as greater robustness in the operating system.