If Microsoft's Surface Pro is the expert's choice of best Windows tablet, what is the device's counterpart among laptops? Techies unanimously picked Apple's MacBook Pro as the best performing Windows laptop.

The basis of the decision was testing done by Soluto, a PC management services company, particularly a long-term analysis of application crashes, freezes, long boot-ups and other general slowdowns in general computing referred to as frustration analytics.

The MacBook Pro 13, priced at $1,199 in mid-2012, got a score of 1.05.

The top 10 list was dominated by Apple Acer, Dell and Lenovo, although in terms of number, Dell had the most with five or half of the top 10.

Soluto admits that comparing a Windows installed on a MacBook Pro with the same software on Acer or Dell is quite unfair since Apple's version or clean or does not have bloatware usually pre-loaded by the original equipment manufacturer of the PC.

However, the report acknowledges downsides such as the need to buy and install Windows via Bootcamp or third-party PC virtualisation software like Parallels.

Here is a complete list of the top 10, their prices and scores in the three-month assessment period from January to April 2013, covering data from 150,000 laptops.

1. Apple MacBook Pro 13 - $1,199 (1.05)

2. Acer Aspire E1-571 - $429 (1.12)

3. Dell XPS 13 - $979 (1.28)

4. Dell Vostro 3560 - $569 (2.09)

5. Acer Aspire V3-771 - $699 (2.44)

6. Apple MacBook Pro 15" Retina - $2,199 (2.51)

7. Dell Inspiron 14z - $549 (2.54)

8. Dell Latitude ESS30 - $519 (2.90)

9. Dell Vostro 3460 - $539 (2.95)

10. Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon - $1,169 (3.20).

Commenting on the line-up, ZDNET said ASUS and Samsung are conspicuously absent on the list, dominated by Dell. But the Web site said it was not surprised by the result since Dell and Acer offer relatively clean installations of Windows and paid close attention to drivers.

It added that Dell included minimal amounts of third-party software in its laptops which boosts the reliability of its products. ZDNET said that on the opposite end, PCs from HP and Samsung had crapware that was a performance-sapping nightmare.

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