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Dell Laptops Still Exploding
bl8n8r writes "It 'looked like fireworks, which would have been cool had it not been in my house.' said Doug Brown of Columbus, Ohio. Brown, a Network Administrator, called 911 last week when the Dell 9200 laptop burst into flames in his house. Emergency response units included two pumpers, a ladder truck, a bamalance, the HAZMAT unit, and a battalion chief. When Doug phoned Dell to inquire about liability, he was asked if he had insurance. It's not clear if Doug's laptop is one of the earlier models recalled by Dell; a Macbook is cited in the article for allegedly burning down a house in Australia as well as another instance of a suspect Dell laptop burning out a pickup truck in Nevada. If the burning battery issues are going to continue to be a problem, who's going to be responsible for losses? Insurance companies, Laptop makers, Battery vendors, and consumer negligence could presumably be cited in all cases."
...what MacBook model went up in flames? (He types from his MacBook.)
Sugapablo
This is what insurance is for though - the unexpected. Surely general household cover would be sufficient? As a matter of interest is it common to bill the houseowner for the fire departments response?
if my dell explodes on a plane, is that a suicide bombing? I'm assuming that I'd be dead, of course.
A) What is a bamalance?
2) This is Columbus, GA not Columbus, OH.
I want a ride in an bamalance, myself, I'll happily have my laptop explode to get a ride.
insurance not the issue, liability is. anyway, silly of guy to call Dell and ask. You get a lawyer and you sue their incompetent labtop-firebomb building asses.
Batteries (you know, those little packages of reactive chemicals?) have been bursting into flames ever since they were invented.
In TFA it cites a couple of modern examples. How many laptop batteries are out there?
Hardly a plague of battery burnin's.
Reminds me of SARS -- you remember, that disease that killed a couple hundred people in 2003 -- which basically shut down Asia for 6 months. Everyone suddenly forgot that the regular old "flu" kills 100,000 people every single year.
If we're gonna panic about "things that cause fatal fires" I'd be stomping on cigarette manufacturers before I went after the company that didn't even make the battery that caught on fire.
Cue 200+ comments to the tune of "I used to trust Dell but now..."
Can we get a new tune up in here?
seriously, it looks like they are more of a proven hazard than water
... a 'Bamalance is a pickup truck, a 3 x 6 foot piece of plywood, two EMT's named Jethro, and a bottle of moonshine for antiseptic AND anaesthetic.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
It's all about the Sony batteries. It's misleading to say "Dell" or "Macbook." They (and many other makers) are using Sony batteries.
Thank God no one actually had them on their lap.
A client of mine asked me to fix his Dell laptop, which was overheating and shutting down to fix the problem. This was before the exploding batteries were in the news.
First of all DO NOT turn off the automatic shut down of the laptop when the processor reaches a certain temperature to fix this problem.
Deleting enough off the drive to defragment it fixed the issue and it stopped overheating. First I had to put the laptop on a metal barbeque frame so it would be cool enough and stay on long enough to defragment it.
Kind of a scary task for your boss to give you now that I think about it... but this was months before it was on the news. I don't know if this is the same issue exactly but I wanted to bring it up.
Consumer negligence? How is the consumer negligent if these guys keep manufacturing batteries that go supernova? I own a low-end HP laptop, and it can get incredibly hot as well. It now has to be sent in for servicing, I suspect that the temperature eventually fried the board. It's under warranty for another couple of months, but I have to fork out over $200 for a year's extended warranty on it. For those kinds of prices, I ought to be leasing them. The growing popularity of laptops have made the manufacturers lazy. They're cutting corners, producing substandard products that are not only more prone to failure, but may very well be dangerous. They'll argue "We're trying to keep the prices down", but that's the same argument Mattel uses for using substandard Chinese factories to produce toys that can potentially poison millions of children. Frankly, I think the time has come to seriously bone-up consumer protection laws. Massive fines, the industry paying for government inspections, and the like. Manufacturers have proven incapable or unwilling to adequately protect the consumer, and we should start nailing their bottom lines severely, so that the fucking shareholders, who seem eager to profit from the crap their companies produce, aren't feeling more directly the pain. Fining Dell or Apple a few hundred million dollars the first time, and then quadruple the second time, will probably raise the price of laptops, but at least we won't be sent out overheating crap.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Actually the enclosures were designed to specifically take the heat away from the components to a [metal] frame that had a larger surface area. It felt hotter to the user but kept the components inside cooler than a plastic case would have.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Just because Dell didn't make the battery, doesn't mean they're not liable. Dell sold him a complete unit, which came with the battery in question (assuming he wasn't using a replacement battery, DNRFTA). Continuing the bad car analogies that roam the savage wastelands of Slashdot: if you bought a used car, under warranty, from a dealer, and a part broke that just happened to be a third-party part (happens often on used cars), would you be ok with the dealer telling you you're SOL? Yeah, I didn't think so.
If you're not already wearing asbestos underwear while reading /., you're not doing it right.
Blank until
Moon Crater, Afghanistan - Izur Abdul Bagdahallahabada carefully plugs in his newest incendiary device; a Dell 9200 laptop.
"By the will of Allah, the infidels have provided the means of their own destruction." Bagdahallahabada says. "We must be careful, of course, that it does not burn down our own houses." he cautions. "My brother, may Allah give him dozens of greased up virgins in heaven, was using a Macbook, and it sent him, his son and a funny little fellow with half a nose flying."
All over Afghanistan, crappy Dell laptops are being found, replacing chemical explosives and home-made gas bombs as the prime way to kill NATO forces. And it's getting worse, as this new, all-too-frightening technology is exported abroad. Just last week, three Iraqi politicians had their penises fried off when their Dell's overheated.
"We like to install WoW on them." Bagdahallahabada explains. "We give it the infidel soldiers, who play these gay, decadent fantasy characters. We wait in the bushes, and kaboom!"
NATO's current head of Afghan operations, Major General Sir Wilfred Ruck-sticks-oxbatten has seen it all too often. "We were enjoying a little porn at my command post, and the Mac laptop just exploded, sending shrapnel in all directions and burning off my bleedin' moustache. The chaps back in Edinborough claim they saw spikes on their seismometers.
Indeed, exploding Dell laptops are causing another problem. The countless number of explosions are making tracking earthquakes nearly impossible. "We had a tech convention in San Francisco last week." said Dr. Bob Underwear, USGS scientist. "Christ, we thought the whole San Andreas fault was making a bee-line for Anchorage. One of my colleagues actually shit his pants, all because seventeen Dells tried to render a 3d graph in realtime."
What the ultimate solution cannot be told. But Mr. Bagdahallahabada clearly feels there's no rush. "When all the world converts to Islam, then we'll make sure they buy HP."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Please take a look at this link: http://apcmag.com/3912/qantas_ban_may_extend_to_ma c_laptops
Whoa-oh, blackened notebook, bam-ba-lam! Whoa-oh, blackened notebook, bam-ba-lam!
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
as long as long as you can control it, and as long as it has a cool sounding countdown.
Really, is it that hard to carry an additional one pound and have a safer and probably better battery in a laptop? Has society gotten that wimpy? The great race to see who can have the thinnest lightest laptop causes problems like this, along with cost cutting in quality and emphasis on bling factor. It needs to stop, maybe a few multi million dollar lawsuits might help, who knows, but there has to be something to get their attention on this generation's "pinto".. Lithium ion batts are cool tech, but they apparently need a lot more work on the stability issues and it would help if engineering dictated the size and weight and config, not marketing.
The mortality rate for flu is around 0.1%. For SARS it was close to 20%. Personally I'd think that was reason enough to panic. You must be really brave. How many times have you had the flu? Care to try out SARS for a change?