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Sony Recalls 18,000 VAIO Laptops
STFS writes "Reuters has a story about Sony having to recall 18 thousand VAIO laptops because apparently there is some risk of users receiving a small electric shock "if you have connected your PC (laptop) to external power, you have disabled your phone line, (while) simultaneously being connected to a grounded peripheral, and you are touching a metal part of the PC, and your phone rings"!" I can't begin to count the number of times that happens ;)
OMG! Thank goodness you stopped me in the nick of time!! I was _just_ about to do that!!
Unique signatures are rare.
I must have happened at least once, or they never would have done the recall. Basic formula, if the cost of a recall is less than the legal bills, they do a recall. Guess someone got zapped pretty good to scare them into a recall.
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This is why I don't buy Sony products. My Dell laptop has never electrocuted me.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
Let me comment... There's the phone.... ARRRRRGHGHGHG!
(no carrier)
This space for rent.
when the line is disabled?
In the US:
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100 Sony Drive
Sony Hills, CA 99888
Attn: Rube Goldberg
If only they could get all computers to do this when the user does something "stupid".
Sony has had to recall 18,000 of its CD's. It seems that listeners are shocked to find out that they paid $20 for an albumn with one good song, 50 minutes of filler, and a media which cannot play in a computer's CDrom drive.
A while back, over in Great Britain, a woman complained to the telephone company about her phone. It would sometimes not ring when someone called. The strange part, she said, was that when it *did* ring, the ring was invariably preceded by her dog barking. So she was convinced she had a broken telephone and a psychic dog. Now, in Britain, the ring signal is a high-voltage low-ampere current sent from the local office to the phone. The wire which carries this signal is run from the pole to a large metal spike in the yard, which grounds the circuit. In order to isolate the problem, the phone company sent a repairman out to climb the pole and manually send the signal down the wire. Sure enough, when he did this, nothing happened the first time. The second time, the dog barked just before the phone rang. Investigation revealed that the dog was chained (with an iron chain) to the spike that grounded the circuit. So this is what was happening: the ground was dry, preventing the ring signal from grounding itself easily through the spike, so the current ran down the chain to the dog, paralyzing him. When the current released the dog, he yelped and urinated, which wet the ground, so that the second ring signal made it through and the phone rang. (yes i copied this off the web somewhere.)
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Nobody's died from the electric shock when the phone rings.
But it sure isn't pleasant.
I got hit with it last time I was mucking around with the wiring in my house. I called myself with the cell to see if it worked.
You know you're stupid when you zap yourself like that...
Business woman: Are there alot of these kind of accidents ?
Jack: You wouldn't believe.
Business Woman: What laptop company do you work for ?
Jack: A major one.
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
imagine a beowulf cluster of those!!!
And yet, they've received "fewer than 10 complaints", not zero, so someone must be doing it, especially since only a minority of affected users probably complain. I wonder what "disabled your phone line" means.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You can get the same effect without a computer. Just hold the end of a phone line with one hand and anything metal and gounded with the other and have somebdy call you. If anything this is a defect with the phone system, not the freaking computer!
This is because the phone company sends a 60-volt (if I remember correctly) pulse down the line to cause a ring...a leftover from the days when it they had to send enough energy to drive the electomechanical bell.
That's Murphy's Law in its original sense: If there is more than one way that something can be installed or connected, and one of those ways leads to catastrophe, someone will eventually do it the bad way. In other words, given enough people and enough time, anything that can be done, however remotely possible, will eventually be done.
Let that be a lesson when designing hardware.
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as a former vaio laptop owner.. I will never buy a Sony product again. Dead after 15 months and extortionist prices from Sony to replace the bad motherboard. Was cheaper not only to buy new, but better laptop as well. Its amazing how much a company can turn you off to their products - not so much because something broke - but by their failure to offer any reasonable resolution. After all, we're not talking $50 calculators. While this recall is a step in the right direction I really wonder if it just caused an *internal* short, instead of perhaps 'shocking' the user, would they even bother.
Mary EcEvoy, a spokeswoman for Sony in the United States, said a user could receive a shock such as that from static electricity
Does it really hurt that much to warrant such a recall? Static electricity is fun to play with, not a violent killer. Go run around a carpet with your socks on and then attack somebody, its great!
I would add to that the loss of goodwill arising from not issuing a recall or only issuing it after being pressured. Sony extracts top dollar by being percieved as being a more supportive company. Not saying it's true, but still.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I mean OW what are the chances OW of OW doing all those OW things at OW (damnit) OW at the same OW time?
OW I know OW when I use my OW Sony Viao OW this OW never OW happens! I'm OW using it right nOW.
This
This is just like that whiny guy that was apparently expecting his McDonald's coffee to be ice cold.
(say a printer or an external monitor)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Wouldn't Senator Hatch just love this:
There is a high risk of users receiving a small electric shock if you have connected your PC (laptop) to external power, you have disabled your phone line, (while) simultaneously being connected to a grounded peripheral, and you are touching a metal part of the PC, while sharing files and your phone rings"
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
... being the poor person working the help desk who had to try and reproduce the problem?
The Vaio (and only the Vaio, mind you *sarcastic grin*) also has a problem when you've got it plugged into the wall and are using it while bathing. They're having to recall all their laptops because someone might get shocked if all these events occur in unison:
Computer is plugged in and turned on
Bathtub is full of water
You are in bathtub full of water
Laptop that is plugged in falls into water
Damn them for shipping out unsafe products.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I just know there's some sort of Nethack joke here!
The story is reprinted at CNN here. The description of what you have to do to get shocked alone is worth the read.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Seriously, Don't take anything I say seriously.
Speaking from experience, getting hit by the current from a ringing phone line can be extremely uncomfortable. Back in the dialup days I always had a second phoneline. I also moved a lot. So most places, I would have them bring the second line to the outside of the house/apartment and then wire it myself to save cash. The last time I did this, the apartment was already wired for two lines but the second one wasn't connected to any of the jacks. So, being a moron, for some reason I was holding the wires for the primary line in my mouth while I was stripping the wires on the second line when somebody decided to call me. Wham! It was like chewing on an electric fence. Very unpleasant experience.
Needless to say I don't put wires in my mouth anymore whether they're connected to anything or not. Looking back I'm not sure why I did it in the first place. I think maybe the wire was wanting to fall back into the wall and I was in a hurry.
I can't begin to count the number of times that happens
Perhaps that's because the Vaio has burned your fingers off.
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Back when BBSes were popular when I was in high school, a friend ran one out of his house. One day his computer died, and he was replacing something in it, so he had it open. He was doing it as quickly as he could, so he just pulled out various cards and laid them wherever was handy. His leg happened to be the 'handy' place to set the internal modem (a 2400 baud, IIRC.) He set it component-side-up. With the phone cord still plugged in. Now, his BBS was reasonably popular (for a one-line BBS.) So, inevitably, someone called while he was working on it. Sent him a decent sized jolt through his leg. He had little burn marks where the phone line connectors were touching his leg for about a week.
Yes, I was there for this adventure. The three of us who were there (aside from him, of course,) were laughing histerically.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
in britain a lady complained that many times, her phone rings but noone is there at the other end. also, whenever this happens, a neighbours dog barks! the coincidence happened too often to be accidental so the phone company investigated it.
they found that there were some loose wires and whenever dog used to pee on them, it used to create short circuit. this used to give shock to dog (guess where) and that is why it was barking. also, due to short circuit, the phone used to ring.
well the phone company fixed the fault and so should Sony do in this case.
"if you have connected your PC (laptop) to external power, you have disabled your phone line, (while) simultaneously being connected to a grounded peripheral, and you are touching a metal part of the PC, and your phone rings"
Wait a minute, somebody told me that was the cheat code to get unlimited gold in Warcraft 3...
Its the original electro-hilarious man! Some of the classic masters of slapstick simply use falldown jokes. While this elicits a few chuckles, none compares to your wildly dangerous and positively shocking stunts! How can you even type after being so succinctly and hilariously electrocuted??? I can't believe you were able to time the phone ringing whilst in the middle of a serious Slashdot post! I am hardly able to type this because I have been hit by sizzling bolt of laugh-lightning! Someone has charged you up the funny-bomb and placed it squarely in the clouds for all of us to be struck with. I'll bet the person on the other end of the phone got a jolt of pure hilarity as well. You have taken a serious discussion of the dangers associated with Vaio laptops and turned it into an electrified romp into the nether-regions of comedy! I would tip my hat to you good sir lest it was not fused to my head! Mods, mod this master of improv +5 High-Voltage-Hilarious!
The laptop affected by the recall is the FR series, or FRV in the United States, a popular model with a large screen and with a price starting around $1,500.
db
Cig:
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there's metal in VAIOs??
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
There's also a 400V (!) insulation test signal that is sometimes applied in the early morning hours (peak water-accumulation time), but it's current-limited to a very low current and only lasts for a few milliseconds. That, incidentally, is what causes "bell tap", where, in the early morning hours, some cheapie phones emit a brief bell signal. Anything that attaches to a phone line must tolerate that 400V spike.
If you've disabled your phone line, why would an incoming call cause a shock? Shouldn't that be the point of disabling it? I'm confused.
--
RumorsDaily
Even as obscure as this seems, it could easily kill you if delivered in just the right way.
It takes just MILLIamps to stop your heart. If you had just gotten out of salt water (or were sweaty...) and grabbed the laptop in one hand and a grounded water pipe with the other and your phone rang, it could potentially kill you just like that.
I'd think people with pacemakers would be even more vulnerable, but I don't know enough about them to comment further.
Sounds like Sony grounded the phone line to the laptop chassis, which is then grounded (probably) to the negative DC end of the power supply which is in turn grounded to common and/or ground on the wall socket. If you disconnect the power and hold the laptop and are then grounded in some way via holding a faucet or something you'd be the return path for the ring voltage.
The fix might be to run it through some sort of heavy resistance to reduce the voltage to something negligible in this situation.
All opinions presented here aren't mine.
Finally! You know how many tech support guys have been begging for that functionality??
:(
Too bad it's being recalled.
Nathan
TI-99A:
The VIAO is designed for extreme computing, driven by a double-capacity battery and equipped with an integrated CD-RW/DVD combo drive. It's arsenal includes a Memory Stick Media slot, for easy control of countless digital devices. It's body chassis is ultra-lightweight, and hardened against minor household accidents.
John:
You'll find a way to destroy it.
TI-99A:
Unlikely, I'm an obsolete design. The VIAO is a far more effective killing machine.
This apparently was a real tech support call.
When they finally sent somebody out to investigate, it turned out that it was a rural farmhouse to which water was supplied from a well.
When they flushed the toilet, the well pump started, which drew enough current on that segment to reboot the pc.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Hell yeah, I mean at least Apple had balls to try to CATCH YOU ON FIRE, with a fault on the battery of the powerbook. Its obvious Sony wants to copy Apple, but not entierly, so as to not get Apples Lawyers on them for copyright infringment or some other stupid thing like the ;-)
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
My ibook tickles me all the time when plugged in. The shock comes from the battery area. I have called apple about it, and they deny it is happening.
Oh well.
I really wish John Cleese could have described the setup of that situation....
"DO pay attention, because it's really quite simple..."
If I was Sony, all I'd do is send out an addendum to the manual that says "Do NOT do this - You'll get zapped"
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
lol.. this news is about a week old (at least for me it is).. I work in the computer department at a local retailer and heard this news like the end of last month... I'm not sure if it's already posted but a quick search on this page didn't yield any results... but in any case, if anyone bought a Sony PCG-FRV25 notebook when it first came out about a week or two ago... that's the one they're talking about...
Apparently "disabled phone line" has a different meaning on the west side of the Atlantic. I thought it meant that no phone calls are allowed through.
--Bud
18K factory reconditioned VAIOs will shortly come onto the market :-)
I wonder on which continent this problem happened. I'm working in a Vaio factory outside the US (I'm not from Sony), does that mean that I should fear for my life every time the telephone rings? And for the colleagues who ARE working with VAIOs? (I am not) :-)
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).