Dell Laptops Still Exploding 186
bl8n8r writes "It 'looked like fireworks, which would have been cool had it not been in my house.' said Doug Brown of Columbus, Ohio. Brown, a Network Administrator, called 911 last week when the Dell 9200 laptop burst into flames in his house. Emergency response units included two pumpers, a ladder truck, a bamalance, the HAZMAT unit, and a battalion chief. When Doug phoned Dell to inquire about liability, he was asked if he had insurance. It's not clear if Doug's laptop is one of the earlier models recalled by Dell; a Macbook is cited in the article for allegedly burning down a house in Australia as well as another instance of a suspect Dell laptop burning out a pickup truck in Nevada. If the burning battery issues are going to continue to be a problem, who's going to be responsible for losses? Insurance companies, Laptop makers, Battery vendors, and consumer negligence could presumably be cited in all cases."
Any word on... (Score:5, Funny)
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More than one case, apparently. Traced links back here [mactalk.com.au], and other posts also seem to indicate more issues than one...
Note, this is primarily a Sony problem, not Apple. No downmods necessary.Jesus Christ, everyone's getting set on fire! (Score:2)
Insurance (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Insurance - not the question (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Insurance - not the question (Score:5, Funny)
"By the will of Allah, the infidels have provided the means of their own destruction." Bagdahallahabada says. "We must be careful, of course, that it does not burn down our own houses." he cautions. "My brother, may Allah give him dozens of greased up virgins in heaven, was using a Macbook, and it sent him, his son and a funny little fellow with half a nose flying."
All over Afghanistan, crappy Dell laptops are being found, replacing chemical explosives and home-made gas bombs as the prime way to kill NATO forces. And it's getting worse, as this new, all-too-frightening technology is exported abroad. Just last week, three Iraqi politicians had their penises fried off when their Dell's overheated.
"We like to install WoW on them." Bagdahallahabada explains. "We give it the infidel soldiers, who play these gay, decadent fantasy characters. We wait in the bushes, and kaboom!"
NATO's current head of Afghan operations, Major General Sir Wilfred Ruck-sticks-oxbatten has seen it all too often. "We were enjoying a little porn at my command post, and the Mac laptop just exploded, sending shrapnel in all directions and burning off my bleedin' moustache. The chaps back in Edinborough claim they saw spikes on their seismometers.
Indeed, exploding Dell laptops are causing another problem. The countless number of explosions are making tracking earthquakes nearly impossible. "We had a tech convention in San Francisco last week." said Dr. Bob Underwear, USGS scientist. "Christ, we thought the whole San Andreas fault was making a bee-line for Anchorage. One of my colleagues actually shit his pants, all because seventeen Dells tried to render a 3d graph in realtime."
What the ultimate solution cannot be told. But Mr. Bagdahallahabada clearly feels there's no rush. "When all the world converts to Islam, then we'll make sure they buy HP."
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This is what insurance is for though - the unexpected. Surely general household cover would be sufficient? As a matter of interest is it common to bill the houseowner for the fire departments response?
Point 1: Even if you have insurance, the matter of liability is always something that needs to be determined. If I have total coverage on my car, I may not care if you hit me or if I hit you, but I can assure you that my insurance company does.
Point 2: No, it isn't. Ambulance services, yes. But not "mere" fire prevention. OTOH, the homeowner does have to foot the bill for the damage to his house.
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Reasonable enough, though.
ban laptops from planes!!! (Score:3, Funny)
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It is for the laptop.
You're joking, of course, but ... (Score:2, Interesting)
A bamalance came to my house once (Score:2)
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Or 'Friar Tuck.'
Rev. Spooner could tell you.
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Editors?!? (Score:2, Informative)
2) This is Columbus, GA not Columbus, OH.
Re:Editors?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
That is, I *hope* the guy is alluding to the old clip, and not seriously trying to spell "ambulance". It's possible, though, that in regards to your post above "2" answers "a"....
Re:Editors?!? (Score:4, Informative)
You mean this one ... [dow-sniper.net]
sweet! (Score:2)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=bamalance&bt
How much for bamalance as an Adword??
And, ever-helpful --
Did you mean: bambalance
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The linked page correctly spelled it as "an ambulance".
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Whoo-oa black betty, bamalance!
Who-ooo-oa black betty ba,alance!
[repeats a lot]
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This explains it better than I can: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen [wikipedia.org]
'bamalance"?! (Score:5, Funny)
It wasn't the battery (Score:2)
Burst into flames != explode (Score:5, Insightful)
In TFA it cites a couple of modern examples. How many laptop batteries are out there?
Hardly a plague of battery burnin's.
Reminds me of SARS -- you remember, that disease that killed a couple hundred people in 2003 -- which basically shut down Asia for 6 months. Everyone suddenly forgot that the regular old "flu" kills 100,000 people every single year.
If we're gonna panic about "things that cause fatal fires" I'd be stomping on cigarette manufacturers before I went after the company that didn't even make the battery that caught on fire.
Cue 200+ comments to the tune of "I used to trust Dell but now..."
Can we get a new tune up in here?
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Your science is flawed. I certainly expect high-density batteries to cause fires. Both because they have and also because of simple, general, chemical principles, the kind we should all have learned in high school.
The question then becomes how many fires, and what I am saying is that the numbers are currently way too low for any conclusion besides that the technology has been, historically, extremely and almost
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Ah, you know they do, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto [wikipedia.org]
Actually the analogy with the Ford Pinto is pretty exact. Read the "Safety Problems" part of that wikipedia page.
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But AFAIK, I have yet to hear about any catastrophic failures of HP/Compaq laptop batteries. If the Dell/Apple/etc. battery fireworks were random catastrophic failures, I would expect failure count for each manufacturer to be roughly proportional to market share... but the failures are centered around specific product runs from select manufacturers, which hints at production problems in some specific Li-ion production runs at specific production plants in more-or-less s
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The problem is that as battery density gets higher the danger from a failure gets higher. Put a dead short accros a D cell and it is no big deal. Put one across a LiION without a protection circuit and it is a big deal.
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Exactly correct. The problem is inherent in the technology.
Couple that with trying to squeeze that battery into a poorly ventilated laptop interior (where you also gotta fit your DVD drive, your CPU, etc. etc.) and you would think we'd see these things going off like bombs every week!
The fact that we don't is what I'm talking about...
Just because Dell didn't make the battery (Score:3, Insightful)
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Not correct, but revealing that this is what you think. Revealing in a "one more example of what I am saying about hype" kind of way.
SARS only killed a couple of hundred because it was WAY HARDER to get SARS from another person that it is to get the yearly 'flu.
SARS managed the trick of being fatal (like the flu) but didn't manage the trick of being horribly infectious (unlike the 'flu,
Re:Burst into flames != explode (Score:5, Funny)
which is another reason to use Sony's sugar-powered batteries. If the thing bursts into flames, at least you'll get a nice dose of caramel =D
Flu vs SARS mortality rates. (OT) (Score:2, Insightful)
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Does the TSA still let Dell laptops on planes? (Score:4, Funny)
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Let's be CLEAR on this (Score:3, Insightful)
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Would over-temperature detection/shutoff prevent those shorts from destroying the battery, or is it a purely internal thing such that it would continue even if you took the battery
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I don't recall people having much patience for companies whose games used particularly bad DRM made by other companies, I think this falls in the same category. Similarly, If x outsources their tech support to shitty company y (to reduce costs), people will still blame x for providing shitty tech support.
That said
All I can say is... (Score:2, Funny)
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I mean, notebooks today have a tendency to get H-O-T. Also explode.
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No laptops for sale here. [dell.com]
I got paranoid and had to take a look. You'll see, from the linked page, that Dell no longer sells laptops. Lawsuit avoided!
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OMG, it's a plot to kill all Linux users! Quick, tell everyone you know before it's too laaaarrrghhh, my legs!
Fragmented Drives Contributing to the Overheat? (Score:4, Interesting)
First of all DO NOT turn off the automatic shut down of the laptop when the processor reaches a certain temperature to fix this problem.
Deleting enough off the drive to defragment it fixed the issue and it stopped overheating. First I had to put the laptop on a metal barbeque frame so it would be cool enough and stay on long enough to defragment it.
Kind of a scary task for your boss to give you now that I think about it... but this was months before it was on the news. I don't know if this is the same issue exactly but I wanted to bring it up.
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Re:Fragmented Drives Contributing to the Overheat? (Score:4, Informative)
This fellow has written some decent, small footprint software that lets a user directly manage the fans and Intel Speedstep settings on many Dell laptop models. Anyone using a Dell laptop that gets a bit warm should check it out.
http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/index.html [diefer.de]
just sue 'em... (Score:2)
In these cases, it seems it would be an easy lawsuit. I would personally refuse to have my own insurance cover it as it is so clearly a product defect. And since both Dell and the battery manufacturers (Sony? Sanyo ? etc) all have deep pockets, it doesn't matter so much who to sue. Mi
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If it were me, I'd file a claim with my insurance company, and then let them go after Dell/Sony/Whoever. The whole point of having insurance is to insulate you from the expense (both monetary and temporal) of dealing with unfortunate mishaps like this.
Believe me. The insurance company isn't going to foot the bill for your claim if somebody else is responsible. They'll fight the battle. And since you're paying them to do that, why would you do it yourself?
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Insurance is not for small piddly things. Insurance is for catastrophes where the risk of getting dropped afterward
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The amount you spend on contents insurance is typically enough that you cover the any one clai
Insurance (Score:2)
Most companies play hardball and tell you to get lost, the only thing you can do is sue them, and then they will complain about people suing them. As they say, shit happens, but if it turns out the manufacturer knew, or reasonably should have known, that the batteries pose an undue hazard, the
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Dell and Sony are clearly negligent here...so why should the laptop owner suffer financially?
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Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
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I bet... none.
That's called "Consumer Negligence".
Same with charging laptops buried int the blankets on your bed or immediately after retreiving it from the car where the temp was 140 deg... the list goes on and on and on.
LiPo's and older Li-Ion batteries are SO amazingly unstable outside a very VERY narrow range of temps and charge states not to mention physically "fragile", they probably really shouldn't
NiMH batteries, anybody? (Score:2)
it may just be that we can't manufacture these things more than one at a time with the care required to keep all that energy density safely in the case.
it happened to Edison, too... only I think it was something like an iron/sulfur battery they couldn't make more than one of.
A particular issue with MacBook sleep problems (Score:2)
I don't know how many people that have MacBooks still have this issue, but I really suspect that I'm not the only one. I've got an earlier MacBook, but bought it form an Apple Store in August of last year, so its really not one of the 1st ones off the assembly line.
Periodically, the MB will wake up and stay on while closed and in say, my bag
Self Destruct Could be a Useful feature... (Score:3, Funny)
laptop battery engineering to marketing criteria (Score:2, Insightful)
Really, is it that hard to carry an additional one pound and have a safer and probably better battery in a laptop? Has society gotten that wimpy? The great race to see who can have the thinnest lightest laptop causes problems like this, along with cost cutting in quality and emphasis on bling factor. It needs to stop, maybe a few multi million dollar lawsuits might help, who knows, but there has to be something to get their attention on this generation's "pinto".. Lithi
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dude... (Score:2)
(as a replacement)
Right?
Dell having MAJOR battery supply problems now? (Score:2)
They told me 3 times it would go out overnight but didn't. Finally, I had a "manager" on the customer service chat swear she would get it resolved and it would ship overnight. HOWEVER, when I tried to pin her down to when it would SHIP, she wouldn't give a date at all and claimed it could take up to 8 days to get it "in the system".
08/25/2007 03:38:40PM Agent (Khushboo Sharma): "The replacement order will be sent to
Very apt! (Score:2)
All I can say is... (Score:2)
Insurance? (Score:2)
Imagine a headline saying "Dell sued for exploding battery insurance company payments" for all those users who called their insurance companies.
Down South ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Funny thing is, there are groups (UN? Red Cross?) that send out Moonshine kits for that very reason.
Re:Not just a macbook (Score:4, Informative)
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That doesn't matter, dude. The CPU is made of sand. Sand won't burn no matter how hot it gets. In fact, some people use sand to put out fires. This problem is related to the batteries.
On the oth
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Re:Concerned... (Score:5, Funny)
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The article claims it was a 9200. That model is now three generations old. The 9000 series went in numeric order as time went by - 9200, 9300, 9400, ????. 9400 (aka E1705) was the previous generation.
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http://event.asus.com/eeepc/ [asus.com]
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1)Toaster fire a la [popular frosted toaster pastry] - extinguised with a cup of flour.
2)Oven fire due to grease in a broiler pan - extinguished with LOTS of flour and a blanket.
3) Microwave fire (On
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Fair Comment, But everyone understands the concept that Knives are sharp. It is a "feature" of being a knife.
Random chance of exploding is not a necessary feature of being a computer, and if it is I certainly don't recall it being mentioned in the Ads.
It might just be a question of time before it sinks in (unless, of course, we manage to drastically improve the technology).
How long until wilderness survival guides have chapters on "how to turn your laptop battery into a signal flare" and "starting a fire with your cell phone battery"? They would probably be quite useful chapters, even.
Of course, as others have touched upon, "how to blow up an aircraft with a beowulf cluster of Dells" would be sure to be a popular article in certain circles.