On the other hand, despite nearly twenty years of mass production, PCs continue to be fickle beasts. Too often, after you unpack your spanking new PC and try booting it up, nothing happens. And that's not all. Too often, even if it's not completely unusable, one or more components conflicts with another component or otherwise doesn't work as it should. And when a unit runs fine initially, too often, it needs repairs within the first year.
Various estimates indicate that as many as one out of four personal computers breaks each year.
All this spells hassle. The single most important factor in buying a PC, therefore, becomes reliability. To maximize the chances of buying a reliable PC, you can use your past experiences and those of colleagues or friends. But you'll get a clearer picture of a system's likely reliability from surveys that tally the experiences of thousands of people. Among the most thorough surveys of PC reliability are those by computer publications.