Many years ago I bought a then cheap $800 Windows 98 laptop on my Amex card. Amex doubles the warranty and just refunds the money to your account when something breaks. You do need to keep the original box, warranty, receipt, bill, etc. And you cannot have an extended warranty. Short story. The power supply has failed in every cheap laptop that I bought since then and been 100% refunded by Amex. I always buy the cheapest promo model, which probably has much to do with it. Every brand. Dell, HP, Compaq, Acer, etc. Anyway, I am now on my 6th or 7th laptop, a Windows 7 machine that overheats and will be returned soon. This one cost $300 though. So over the years, I have just been getting money back and new laptops every 1+ years.
I have Dell for the work laptop and the Dell extended warranty, the good one where they come to your job or house, it is definitely worth it. I remember being in a hotel room 2k miles from home. Someone knocked my laptop off the table and the screen broke. 1 call, a couple of hours later, a tech was in the hotel swapping the screen, all covered under warranty.
My wife does not have a laptop, she checks a different one out from work every night. You can imagine the abuse these things take. They are MacBook Airs and they hold up really well. The hard drive does not do a whole lot though, everything is stored in the cloud, and it has a flash drive instead of a spinning hard drive, so that Mac is not susceptible to hard drive issues.
