I fix a lot laptops with problems, and lately I've come across several with poorly working touchpads. Sometimes the touchpads won't respond, for example I can move my finger across the touchpad and the mouse pointer will only move intermittently. The most recent example was a brand new ASUS K55V. It seems to be a serious design fault and not actually faulty touchpads. I am wondering if this is a common problem. As someone who aside from while at work never uses an external mouse this is a big concern for me. Luckily the touchpads on all of the laptops I've ever owned have worked fine, even on my cheap and nasty no brand Chinese netbook. While I find it unacceptable for any laptop to have these issues, I am particularly surprised about the ASUS having problems, as I have come to expect better quality from them.
I have an Asus laptop that's a few years old now, and never had any issues with the touchpad. Just found it a bit too sensitive, so I used the utility to adjust that a little, but otherwise it's always been ok. Not sure why the new ones would be flaky..... I have it set up as a desktop with external mouse, keyboard and monitor, so it matters even less now...
I've never had any problems on any other Asus laptops, but am somewhat hesitant to recommend Asus laptops now.
A recent "study" by Soluto claims the most reliable laptops, top 10, was mostly Dell and Acer, and couple of Apples that were more expensive than others. But those at the top 10 were just some models, and don't prove anything about other models' reliability. I'd consider how the service runs at your living location, and can you remove the dust by yourself just by opening a hatch.
I just read the article, and results are highly misleading. You need to consider that the vast majority of crashes, BSODs and other problems are not result of hardware failure, but rather software issues - in which case they can be fixed. The only reason the MacBook Pro is in 1st place, is because it does not come with Windows preinstalled, meaning that it will be running a clean install of Windows. With a clean install of Windows, there will be faster boot times, and less background processes running, than with a preinstalled Windows with lots of software already installed. The big problem with a test like this is that as I have said, just about all the issues which are being anaysed are software issues, and are not an inidcation of the actual relibaility of the laptop itself.
