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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!!
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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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Let me comment... There's the phone.... ARRRRRGHGHGHG!
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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.
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"
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... being the poor person working the help desk who had to try and reproduce the problem?
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.
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Umm. I think they mean that the user disabled the phone line functionality in the Vaio, meaning the computer doesn't respond when someone calls that phone line.
Here's how I interpeted it. Your laptop environment meets the previously outlined criteria. Someone calls your phone, which can be thought of as a small electrical current being sent to your phone. Because the the phone line is disabled on the Vaio and Sony didn't design the system correctly, the electrical current from the phone travels into the laptop hardware, the metal frame I guess. The computer is grounded, and you are touching some metal part of the laptop (read conductor). Therefore, the electrical current is passed into you, resulting into a minor shock.
I am certainly not an EE, but that makes sense to me.
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."
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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!
there's metal in VAIOs??
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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.
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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.
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