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HP Recalls 135,000 Laptop Batteries
caffeine_monkey writes "AP is reporting that Hewlett Packard is recalling 135,000 notebook batteries because they occasionally overheat and melt. Affected models are HP Pavilion, Compaq Presario, HP Compaq and Compaq Evo. More details are on the HP support site. From their FAQ: Is it safe to buy HP notebooks? Absolutely. HP fully stands behind the products it makes."
So they foresee that all future batteries until 20005 will need to be recalled?
http://www.rayn.net . Funny. Stuff.
"HP fully stands behind the products it makes."
Possibly with a big plate of chobham armor in-between?
and the recently fired 15000 employees!
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
Notice it's 'buy' rather than 'use'! No wonder they can state it so definitely.
At a safe distance of 50-100 feet.
Q: I don't speak Hindi, can I still call Tech Support?
A: No.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
According to someone on a compaq/linux list to which I subscribe:
"Since there have been at least 16 incidences of batteries catching fire, HP
will replace batteries with serial numbers beginning with GC, IA, L0 or L1.
These include many batteries shipped with the HP/Compaq R3000, zv5000 and
nx9105 models (my nx9105 had an 8 cell battery with a serial number starting
with GC).
http://www.hp.com/support/BatteryReplacement
This again confirms that the batteries truly suck, at least the 8 cell ones.
At least I'll get a new one."
notebook... usually in the lap... not a good place for it to be if the batts overheat and melt.... "honey, know all that money we were wasting on birth control? wont need it anymore...."
I suggest we start a betting pool and take bet on who's next and when.
don't make me laugh.
I am always fixing peoples PCs, I don't mind, most of the time it's drivers or spyware. I had a good friend come over two weeks ago with a Compaq presario 1000 (compaq now owned by HP and HP responsible for their products).
The (slightly over 1 year old) laptop would not turn on. No response at all, when you hit the power, it made the tiniest of 'whirrs' and did nothing. So I guessed it was a broken Video card or bad ram. It was something I wasn't going to touch anyway. I decided just on a whim (while we waited for the kettle to boil) to google. Turns out this is a very common problem with this X1000 model. Compaq used over-clocked 9000 ATI cards driven as 9200s. They overheated and over time worked themselves out of the motherboard. A quick initial fix was to press the 67Y keys very hard. I did it, and the laptop booted.
Problem is, this is not a repair, apparently the problem will repeat until that fix doesn't work. This occurred in Sweden, and in Sweden the law is if the problem is manufacturers, you have a 3 year guarantee. So my friend gets her cash back (to buy a powerbook or Toshiba on my recommendation). All the poor bastards in the US (who have a forum to complain about this issue) are out of luck, HP have ignored them. They sold mislabelled and unfit-for-purpose hardware and shafted their customers. Most of the comments I read about this (frankly terribly designed and ugly) laptop were all saying "never HP,never again".
Hp are not the company they were 10 years ago.
It's better than an exploding battery. Especially if you're on an airplane. :P
It seems that the defect has to be potentially life-threatening for HP to react. I have an HP ZD7000 laptop. There is a known fault in something to do with the RAM controller wherein - if you have the secondary RAM slot filled - the laptop will reboot or shutdown spontaneously in instances of applications that have heavy memory usage (I'm assuming those that have requirements of memory from both slots). Generally the problems have been noticed in photoshop, but I've had them occur in GIMP or some games. Others have been experiencing the same problems. Adobe has a warning on this.
So I've contacted HP technical support about this. I've talked on the phone, and then by email. The representative from HP assured me that no such issue existed, and we back-and-forthed for awhile. Eventually, I found this article on HP's own website. When I emailed it to the HP rep, he prompted stopped answering my emails.
Maybe if my battery had exploded I would have gotten better support from HP, but it seems it has to be a big issue for them to do anything about it.
"HP fully stands behind the products it makes?" Maybe, but only when it looks like it might lose them money due to lawsuits or poses a health risk.
I'd guess you are right, no one is going to care about this except those sorry bastards having their laptop on their lap when the battery overheat and melts.