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Sanyo Blamed in Lenovo Battery Recall
ukhackster writes "Those overheating laptop batteries are back. Lenovo is recalling 205,000 'extended' batteries which shipped with its ThinkPad machines, or were bought as replacements. Slashdot readers will doubtless remember the flak which Sony attracted last year, after it was blamed for exploding Dell notebooks and several massive recalls. This time, the batteries were made by Sanyo. Their engineers determined that the failure was repeatable by dropping machines using the batteries from a certain height and at a certain angle. As soon as the repeatable nature of the flaw was determined, a recall was issued."
As soon as the repeatable nature of the flaw was determined, a recall was issued.
Correction: As soon as finance and legal determined that the:
1 - The cost of settling out of court with the projected number of people harmed by this defect.
2 - Lost business due to bad publicity caused by this defect.
would exceed the cost of recall, a recall was issued.
.... as there have been others:
0 DE2DB1731F93BA35751C1A9609C8B63m -cellphone-battery-recall.html
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C
http://www.techspot.com/news/23809-sanyo-faces-13
I guess this proves that it's not just Sony that puts the "boom" into laptops.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
A Sanyo spokes-person reports that the recall involves affixing a sticker to the affected batteries as to the proper height and angle from which to drop a laptop to avoid battery failure. All other procedures will void the warranty.
[Actually, their methodology reminds me of an old Police Squad episode where the detectives were trying to determine how a body fell into the chalk outline by repeatedly shooting volunteers from different angles. In the background was a pile of bodies from previous experiments.]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Lenovo - Bad batteries
Sony - Rootkits
Microsoft - FUD / monopolistic designs
Apple - DRM
I'm just going to sit here in the dark and enjoy my sense of self-righteousness.
Mmmmmmm.....
Batteries are pretty dense and thus tend to have a lot of inertia relative to the rest of the guts of a device. If you drop an electronic device (or anything for that matter) onto a hard surface, it is in for a good few gs of acceleration. Sure, there are posts and reatining plastic etc, but these tend to be stronger in some angles than others.
Sometimes certain damage only happens within a certain "shock window". Eg. Drop from 2 ft and nothing breaks, the plastic retains everything; drop from 3ft and the two posts retaining the battery fail allowing the battery to strike the hard disk and get dented; drop from 6 ft and a different buch of posts fail causing the stress to be relieved in a different way and the battery does not strike the hard disk.
And, actually, lab engineers do routinely test for drop and vibration failure but that is more in the interests of seeing at what point a system fails rather than looking for safety issues a battery explosion.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You give Lenovo your ThinkPad product and serial number, battery serial number, shipping address and they'll ship you a new battery in 4-6 weeks. Go to it if you have a battery of model 92P1131.
You can use `cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info | grep model` to find your battery model without removing it.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!