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Dell's Exploding Laptop Autopsy
An anonymous reader writes "Dell has gone to the Consumer Product Safety Commission looking for help determining the cause of death for its exploding laptop. Dell has been blaming the lithium ion battery; the commission seems to have had a few problems with those batteries in the past."
I think you mean lithium ion cannon.
I play with a lot of R/C stuff - planes, helicopters etc. And the warnings about Li-Po batteries are pretty explicit. If you where to crash a plane with a Li-PO you need to set the battery in a fire proof container and keep an eye on it for an hour or so. Also never charge Li-Po un-attended - people have burned down houses because of it.
I suspect the laptop had a hard drop sometime in the not to distant past, got picked up, put on charge and kaboom.
The question is what is the right thing to do? Ban the batteries or make better efforts in consumer education? In the R/C hobby we are smart enough (well the majority anyhow) to treat Li-Pos with respect - but consumer laptops, that's somewhat scary.
http://www.laureanno.com/RC/fire-pics.htm
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
That batteries can explode is no secret. Managing the charging correctly is critical ... and a battery which is on the road to exploding has lots of "markers" (fast heat rise, wrong charging profile, etc.).
... for the battery vendor to have QA practices that allow marginal batteries, and for Dell (since they are the ones being fingered, not because I know anything about their practices) to skip additional safety logic beyond whatever minimal standards the battery vendor has specified.
It seems to me that low margins are the root cause
it is time for the penguin on top of your Dell to explode!
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
...but I do applaud their willingness to at least show a hint of taking responsiblity for these problems. If there is a hint of them refusing to help people affected by this condition I haven't seen it yet, not out of ignorance but for not Googling it.
Today I got a letter in the mail from my old insurance agency who is being sued in a class-action lawsuit regarding discrimination based on credit reports against the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Of course, the class action settlement included the phrase "xxx is admitting no wrongdoing in this case..." Maybe there wasn't any wrongdoing; I don't know. But this damned phrase has become so commonplace it was the first sentence I looked for when opening the letter with the details of the settlement.
For once I'd like to see someone step up and take responsibility. The problem is these people read the same headlines I do every day in which some dumbass can sue for whatever reason they deem applies to them and win millions in a settlement.
We can't have companies exposing themselves to such litigation (excepting that there is no real negligence there) and getting sued into obliion. But just once I want to see a company take the high road and say "Yeah, we fucked up. Sorry. What can we do to make it better?"
Dell gets a smiley face in my daily repoirt card for this.
"This food is problematic."
Looking for explosive performance?
You may find Dell's new laptop too hot to handle!
It puts you in the middle of the action, with sound effects so real you'll swear you can feel them.
Blazing action so intense it's practically assault and battery!
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
On the other hand, if the battery exploded entirely by itself, a major recall is due...
It took me some creative digging, but I found what you were talkingabout. I remember seeing the article in Popular Mechanics a couple years back when it first came out. http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/compute rs/1279251.html