I have no experience with HP laptops, but I own an HP desktop that gave me absolutely no hardware issues - ever. I still have it, which is about 6 years old and will run SC4 decently. My current PC is a home-built with drives from another HP desktop
I didn't do the original build, but I helped the guy do it. A few years later, I acquired it and about a year after that, something totally messed up the hard drive so I had to reinstall the OS. The HD itself is sound, so I think it was the underpowered PSU that may have caused the failure (upgraded it, no problems).
BTW, if you ever have a non-booting HD and have info on it that you ABSOLUTELY NEED TO RETRIEVE BEFORE FORMATTING, look into a Linux-based boot CD - I was able to save ALL of my pictures, videos, etc with a Puppy Linux boot CD (and a couple of flash-drives) before I re-formatted the HD. Probably won't work for mechanical failures, though.