The result most surprising to me is that laptops are between 25% and 60% less likely than desktop machines to crash from a hardware fault during the first 30 days worth of measurements.
The much larger weight and volume of desktops would seem to make them easier to cool.
That caught my eye too.. perhaps it's because laptops are designed with being carried around in mind? Or, to draw on the other conclusions from the paper, because laptops generally have lower-frequency chips (and for that matter, slower memory and disks too)?
How it works? Laptops have a battery. Hence they are less likely to power off suddenly when mains voltage drops. And powering off suddenly increases the probability of some electronics in the system failing. No need to research, just simple electronics and logic.
Interesting that they knew that CPU speed resulted in more crashes but didn't test this when it came to laptops vs desktops. If only they had released their data :(
The much larger weight and volume of desktops would seem to make them easier to cool.