Doesn't matter much which brand you get, they all have a fairly high failure rate by the 3 year mark. It's just that HP is comparatively higher (due to poorly designed cooling in many of their laptops) than Asus, which still has a one in six chance of failure in 3 years.
Anyway, don't just blindly avoid HP, go by what the actual reviews for each laptop says. If nobody complains about the heat, you're golden. Same with Acer and the others, not ALL of their laptops are bad, just certain models that give the brand a bad name (remember that they just assemble laptops, not make them, so bad parts will bring any brand down).
...but do stay away from Compaq. They're built to be cheap, and I've yet to see a single Compaq that isn't a POS. Dell (same company that builds Compaqs) Latitude laptops are much better in quality (even if they do use cheap motherboards).