More exploding laptops. 3rd party batteries at blame?
Over at Pajamas Media I took note of this link to a UK Linux group where a discussion of an exploding laptop event is posted.
Alan was on the other side of the room from the laptop. I was elsewhere. He yelled out, I ambled towards the room in my own good time, and then I heard Fire! Real fire! Call the fire brigade, now! and I speeded up a bit.
From Alan subsequently, I gather there was an explosion and flying pieces of laptop, and a fireball, and a couple of fires started where (presumably) boiling battery landed, and one fragment smashed an LCD monitor. And then there was smoke and smell (there is still smell) and smoke alarm wailing and firemen and sirens and paramedics (happily unneeded) and police and a man with a notebook asking questions for the fire report.
And now there is black dust everywhere in the room and a stench in the house but remarkably little damage. To my disgust, even Alan’s model railway is intact, although the platforms look like they have been covered in coal (hah). Because the fragments went everywhere, we have an entertaining session of “check all the wires” ahead of us now.
One more thing. Smoke alarms are a really good idea. Ours went off within minutes. I don’t know whether this is true for all of the UK, but in Wales the fire service will come round and check your house and and give you smoke alarms for free and tell you useful things you might need to know. I am very glad they did.
I am a firm believer in the notion that the “brand-name” laptop manufacturers tend to overcharge for their accessories and replacement parts. Since the Dell laptop incident reported several weeks ago and now this one, however, I’m thinking that power systems parts should only be bought from the people who built your machine to begin with. I have a Thinkpad almost exactly like the one referenced in the story above (and yes, they do have pictures you should really see) and it would suck mightily to have this kind of damage happen to it. Especially where the laptop is a company-owned beast, like mine, stick to that brand-name label.
