Study Names MacBook Pro 'Best Performing Windows Laptop'
A clean install is the key.
Buying a computer is a big purchase, so it stands to reason that most of us spend quite a bit of time thinking about the best solution in the world. Still, even if you did spend quite a bit of time thinking about which is the best Windows laptop, it's unlikely you would have come up with the MacBook Pro as your answer.
According to CNet, the MacBook Pro came out ahead of offerings from Dell, Acer, and Lenovo in a recent study by Soluto. Soluto was looking for the best performing Windows laptop and performed "frustration analytics" on popular makes of PCs to find the answer. The computers were then scored based on a combination of crashes, hangs, BSoDs, and boot and background processes.
Apple's 13-inch 2012 MacBook Pro scored 1.05, with the PC in second, Acer's E1-571, scoring 1.12. Dell's XPS13 came in third with a score of 1.28. CNet quotes Soluto as saying a "main factor" in the MacBook Pro's metrics is the fact that "every Windows installation on it is clean." Because other PC manufacturers have a tendency to bundle new computers with a lot of pre-installed software, the installs aren't as clean, which means the competition is a bit unfair. Soluto reasons that this should be something of a wake up call to other manufacturers.
"With PC manufacturers loading so much crapware on new laptops, this is a bit of an unfair competition," Soluto said. "But, on the other hand, PC makers should look at this data and aspire to ship PCs that perform just as well as a cleanly installed MacBook Pro."
What's interesting is that while the mid-2012 13-inch MacBook Pro placed first, the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display placed sixth, with a score of 2.51. That's still four places ahead of Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but quite a ways away from the 13-inch MacBook Pro's prestigious spot of first place.

Move on, nothing to see here.
Move on, nothing to see here.
True. As we forget about CNET more and more, they have to come up with garbage to keep themselves in the news. It's their version of a sex tape.
^theres the problem right there
The average consumer that has to live with the crapware that comes on windows laptops doesn't have a clue how to get windows onto a mac.
LOL
I always do fresh Windows installs on any laptop I purchase. From that perspective, my Macbook Pro was by far the worst laptop I've ever owned. The drivers were less mature or feature rich than most PC equivalents, and they ate relatively large amounts of CPU time for no particularly good reason. Optimizing things at a BIOS/EFI level wasn't really an option either.
Beyond the day-to-day frustrations, that machine had several hardware problems after the first year (CD drive, keyboard, LCD screen, track pad). All my Apple friends, that swear by their Macbooks, also have all had problems with almost all of their computers within one or two years. But their solution is just to buy the latest model every year.
Or you could just do a fresh install on some actual PCs and get the best of both worlds at half the price?
Not trying to make a pun, but any time apple is included in a review they are generally comparing apples to oranges. If you compare fresh retail windows on one machine to another machine then it must be the same exact version. I wonder if they even considered 64bit and 32bit..... This is why it came from cnet and not toms.