|  although I'm not an HP user, I think the news you've just received is a bit exagerrated. It's like me, my "kuya" or my sister over exagerrating some topic or just heard an exagerrated topic in a tambayan but of course oftentimes not intentionally. I think its part of socializing especially in our side of the planet and can't be easily rooted out. In reality, it would always depend largely on the part of the user, how he/she handles the machine. HP is a strong brand, an industry leader in the personal computer department. If its true that generally their laptops get bogged down within/after 18 months of use, it will speedily reflect in their revenues, and news will be in bloomberg or cnbc, or if its in a much larger scale, would be included in one of the frontline news in TV and newspaper media. Especially now that we live in Internet era, a thing of that magnitude would hurt even a giant company. That's why companies like HP which is known for reliability has standards that would prevent things like that from happening. And to think that their HP mini laptops gives a strong impression in sales proves that their product can be still relied upon. Generally in my opinion, its still safe to root out for an HP brand of laptop,companies like them specifically have better warranties than manufacturers of NEO notebooks and the like. But it doesn't mean they are generally better. To prove how catastrophic a thing like if HP does have a problem with their products and are complained upon by the general users and eventually pc experts, way back in mid-90's Intel did have a problem of similar magnitude where in their Pentium processors had a defect in which it would fail to compute complex numbers, which is greatly used in scientific and programming works. It can spell doom for the company but thanks to a quick reaction, it is averted on time. Intel issued recalls of millions of its faulty Pentium products and gave rebates to the public with no questions asked. Imagine Pentium in its fledgling years having that kind of problem. It could easily have been exploited by the competitor AMD, makers of athlon and the likes, but fortunately for Intel, didn't happened. Another example would be sony's memory card for the playstation 1. It did too have similar faulty problems, and have been addressed fast. If companies enter into problems like that for a while, competitor products emerge temporarily and took almost 90 to 100% of their sales, and its a sign that the product clearly failed. As for HP, I can't see any signs of major mayhem looming upon them, as their sales on that sector is way above average, directly toe-to-toe with Dell for the top spot in laptops. I think the problem is that HP is a branded pc, and its hard for us pinoys to use a branded pc because of their full capability being hindered by services and softwares that would require you to be a US resident and in US soil, otherwise you can get into lots of problems, like operating system assistance, hardware upgrades, backing ups and much more. Thankfully its not as its used to be 10 years ago. Branded PC's like HP, Dell, Compaq, and their lot are becoming more user-friendly for the international market, but still some of them had issues in a much fewer area than it used to be. That's why they are now more of a choice today than in the past when NEO notebooks, and Asus standard size & EEE laptops are the top choices because of open market appeal and ease of use. Branded pcs like HP are now becoming open for they realize that by selling PCs that can be easily customized by users and is not tied up by features that are only proprieatary to them, can greatly boost up their income. When it comes to having to ponder which laptops to buy, I personally recommend Lenovo laptops, big and small, because in the past their used to be called "IBM thinkpads" the leader in laptops back when IBM still is engaged with the personal computer market, before they sold it to the Chinese PC maker giant. Today Lenovos' are a top seller in the laptop sector, behind only from HP and Dell. But if you're gunning for style and slickness in its stricter sense, then you might opt for a Sony Vaio, or more likely if you still had more extra cash, for an Apple Macbook. The cream of the crop would be Macbook Air, and boy will it thrill you to maximum laptop computing pleasure.
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