My anecdotal evidence points the other way. My own Ho dv6 gave me a good 4 years of running.

- Yes, the crapware is unavoidable. but who doesn't ship with that?

- For me the system restore worked like magic. I tried it a bunch of times on my own machine and those of some friends. The machine was virgin again with just a click of a button.

- It's also very easy to get into. Very helpfully labeled; tons of guides available online. It's like its designed to be opened and hacked around. When it finally died, I scavenged it for parts and ported to my new desktop machine