I've semi-officially given up on laptops. They're a great concept that were ultimately destroyed by the constant drive to create cheaper products, which in turn results in a product that works for maybe a year and a half before exhibiting serious problems.
My nx6325 decided to kick the bucket yet again, a mere three months after I received it back from HP's support facilities with the so-labeled "defective" motherboard replaced. It's now exhibiting the same problems yet again, which have (among other things) driven me into a rage of sorts about the quality of manufacturing nowadays. A number of people have found it quite ironic that my replacement lineup of PCs predates the turn of the millennium and are in near-perfect working condition. This is where I made the distinction of my problem being related directly to quality of manufacture rather than to laptops in general: my replacement laptop (used for word processing and Web browsing) is eleven years old and runs as if it were purchased yesterday.
Unfortunately, we seem to have hit rock bottom at the end of a relatively short decline in product quality. A machine from 1997 easily outlives its expected lifespan many times over, while a machine from 2006 can barely even make it the three years that's expected of it. I know I'm not the only one that suffers from these sorts of problems: a number of my friends have reported problems of some sort with their laptops within a year of purchasing them. Perhaps a worst-case scenario, one friend in particular had an expensive Sager gaming laptop completely stop functioning within a few months of its purchase. Distributors have generally responded with longer warranties rather than better-quality products: the average warranty period for a laptop, as I've noticed, has increased from 90 days to a full year since 2003, with some distributors venturing as high as three years standard. It seems to me that this is designed both to generate appeal for the unit with a promise of long lifetime, and an ultimate exploitation of human stupidity in that the vast majority will simply ditch the laptop and buy a new one, regardless of whether their three-year warranty has expired yet.
As I work with desktops on a regular basis, I've become wary even of their newer prebuilt incarnations, which seem to have similar failure rates to some post-2000 laptops. I suppose the only decent course of action from here would be to build a machine from scratch and spare parts I have laying around, hoping that the individual parts purchased won't die at one point or another.
Whatever works, I suppose. If a Pentium 1 can make a reliable replacement for a modern dual-CPU machine, so be it. For now, I'll take reliability over speed.