It’s unlikely your laptop will catch fire, as a Dell notebook did in Japan earlier this summer. But nearly one-fifth of all notebook PCs will break down during their lifetime, needing a new hardware component to fix the failure, according to a Gartner study. Motherboards and hard drives fail most frequently. Desktops suffer from the same weaknesses, but they break less often. Five percent of new desktops will break within 12 months, and 12 percent will break within four years, Gartner estimates. In comparison, 15 percent of laptops will break within a year, and 22 percent within four years.