HP Recalls 50,000 Lithium-Ion Laptop Batteries Over Fire Risk

HP announced this week that it is recalling the lithium-ion batteries in more than 50,000 laptops because of the danger of fire in cases of battery malfunction. From a report: "These batteries have the potential to overheat, posing a fire and burn hazard to customers," the company said in a statement. "For this reason, it is extremely important to check whether your battery is affected." The recall affects the battery, not the entire computer. Consumers should run HP's Validation Utility software to determine if their battery has been recalled. If the battery needs to be replaced, they should then install an update that will put the device in Battery Safe Mode, which will discharge the battery and prevent it from being charged until it's replaced. This update will allow consumers to continue using the computers safely with AC power while they wait for a new battery. The recall affects batteries sold with, or as accessories for, the following models: HP Probook 640 G2, HP ProBook 640 G3, HP ProBook 645 G2, HP ProBook 645 G3, HP ProBook 650 G2, HP ProBook 650 G3, HP ProBook 655 G2, HP ProBook 655 G3, HP ZBook 17 G3, HP ZBook 17 G4, HP ZBook Studio G3, HP x360 310 G2, HP Pavilion x360, HP ENVY m6, and HP 11 Notebook PC.

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[DontBeAMoran]

But are today's laptops intelligent enough that they sort of bypass the battery when plugged into an electrical outlet?

Wow! Ethical behavior.

[plopez]

HP is doing the right thing by disabling the battery and recalling the the defective. Instead of stone walling, denying a problem, or shifting the blame. What has the world come to?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I was fully expecting a PR piece along the lines of "The battery bug does not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete files."

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[DontBeAMoran]

You forgot to add something about badly dividing.

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[plopez]

Or a blatant failure to fix re: Intel

and it's an easy swap unlike apple need to reglue

[Joe_Dragon]

and it's an easy swap unlike apple need to re glue screen to change battery there

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[Gilgaron]

It may help that they probably have their battery supplier on the hook for some of the cost, and that if they do nothing a jury looking at burn victims would crucify them versus the abstractness of a processor cluster losing performance.

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[DickBreath]

If HP will send a technician out to replace a melted or charred battery with a less charred one, then that's a good thing.

I'm melting, melting! Oh, what a world, what a world!

Now if they could only get them not to melt or char in the first place.

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[r1348]

Maybe they could provide a detection method that doesn't assume you run Windows on their hardware?

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[DaveV1.0]

So customers (like me) who immediately removed Windows and the HP bloatware from their laptop in favor of a free operating system must reinstall Windows to find out if their battery is affected?

HP doesn't support Linux so as soon as you removed Windows, you are on your own. Linux is an edge case which most companies don't support and you know this so quit whining about it

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[DontBeAMoran]

HP may not support Linux, but this is a hardware problem. What does this validation utility do? Does it read a serial number from the battery's microcontroller? If it does, the serial number is probably also printed on the battery and this whole thing is just to make it easier to access for regular users. AC is right to be pissed off about this.

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[DaveV1.0]

HP doesn't support Linux, which is an unsupported edge case, so they aren't going to write an application for Linux. As AC's laptop didn't come with Linux and HP doesn't sell it with Linux and doesn't support it with Linux, explain why AC has a right to be pissed off. It is the equivalent to buying a Jaguar, replacing the engine with a small block Chevy V8, then being upset that the Jaguar dealer has no way to tell if the engine is causing shifting problems for the transmission.

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[DontBeAMoran]

Replacing the OS on a computer does not change the hardware, your analogy is flawed.

But it's also true that HP has no requirement to make their utility for Linux, since as you say they only sell the laptop with Windows.

Another example: maybe he needed to install an older version of Windows for reason X, and the utility only works on Windows 10 so he couldn't run it either.

But my point still remains, if all the utility does is read a serial number in a microcontroller, number that also happens to be printed

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[DaveV1.0]

All analogies are flawed in that way.

The point of the analogy was that making a major and unsupported change to a product or device effectively guarantees that the manufacturer isn't going to support what one has done to the product or device.

I could have said "It's Linux. Decompile the app and write a version for Linux." instead of actually explaining why it is irrational to expect HP to support something he did to his computer that they don't support when he asked if he had to reinstall Windows to c

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[Translation Error]

According to the FAQ page, if you can't install the validation tool, you should contact HP through the support form: https://batteryprogram687.ext.... [hp.com]

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[omnichad]

Plenty of options here:
1) Install Windows 10 to an external hard drive. Run the utility before Windows Activation kicks in.
2) Contact them [hp.com] through the battery recall web site and give them your laptop serial number and battery barcode number (yeah, you might have to take it apart - what do you expect?)

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[Hognoxious]

Why do they need all that info? They could just put a list of serial or lot numbers up.

If I was a cynic I might suspect they're trying to put people off.

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[omnichad]

They almost certainly weren't smart enough to keep track of which battery went into which laptop.

If they were trying to put people off, they would have made an EFI-bootable USB image. Would have been better for Linux users and worse for most of their customers.

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[Hognoxious]

One of the things it asks for is the serial number. If they can't find it from that I'm not seeing how mother's maiden name, favourite actor & shoe size will help.

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[torkus]

They almost certainly weren't smart enough to keep track of which battery went into which laptop.

Citation? Otherwise I'll make the exact opposite statement and give the follow:

Manufacturers, particularly larger integrators like Dell, buy tons of parts from suppliers and assemble them into their finished products. Tracking what batches of supplies are where in the production chain and what equipment they wind up in is critical to finding and tracking problems so they can be addressed...well so they can do a cost analysis of broad replacement vs. individual and similar.

Based on experience (20+ years in

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[PPH]

I'm surprised that hardware level stuff like this doesn't have a BIOS level utility for reading serial numbers, configuring hardware, etc. Or their own little HP support s/w partition.

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[omnichad]

"Pro" is codeword these days for a glued-shut sealed unit with soldered components. I guess they base "pro" solely on how easy it is to carry around all day.

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[PPH]

Notice how many of these models are also "Pro" series

They will be re-naming this the "Doh!" series.

Thank you for the list of affected models

[drew_kime]

People complain every time there's a summary that leaves out key details. This one includes the model numbers. Thought it only right to give praise where due.