dell on fire

http://blogs.smh.com.au/ и малко по стара новина за това: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/07/28/

Ужас

If you own or use a Dell laptop, you’d be more than a little worried by these recent reports about self-immolating computers.

Okay, these are three reported incidents out of, what, how many millions must they sell?

But remember, these are not simply reports of overheating. We’re talking about full on explosions, flames, molten plastic and the lot.

Two of them happen after the bettery recall last December and it’s unclear whether the Singapore incident reported in our story today was one of three cases Dell referred to when they announced the recall.

Already there’s been suggestions that the problems were more widespread than Dell first admitted.

Earlier this month, the CRN website, quoting an unnamed source, reported that Dell “grappled with apparently severe overheating problems in scores of notebooks for at least two years before it announced a recall of 22,000 notebooks last year, according to a source close to the company”.

More disturbing is the suggestion that the incident in Illinois that came to light last week, happened when the computer was in standby mode.

(Because this post has been heavily hit since it was cited last week, the images are not appearing. You can see a copy of one of the images here.)

Certainly the owner of the destroyed laptop was not using his computer at the time it went up.

Time for a full and frank disclosure.

By way of background to our report, the man in Singapore whose Dell caught fire did not contact us about the incident - at least not directly.

He posted a comment in our travel blog and we chased him up about it.

He supplied us with these images of his desk showing burn marks on the table top and of the laptop, a Latitude D410 model, showing extensive damage to the underside of the computer consistent with a traumatic malfunction in the battery area.

——

Another example of spontaneous combustion by a Dell laptop has emerged accompanied by graphic images of the molten aftermath.

This latest report comes in the wake of a flaming Dell laptop that was captured on film in the act of exploding during a conference in Osaka in Japan last month and another Dell that reportedly burst into flames at an office in the US state of Illinois just last week.

A reader in Singapore, who has requested that he not be identified, told us his Dell laptop supplied to him by his company had been involved in a similar act of self-immolation.

The incident took place one evening in early November. The man was working from home when the computer suddenly began to make “popping noises”.

“It wasn’t quite an explosion, but white smoke began to pour out of the machine, completely filling up the room, and there were flames coming up the sides of the laptop,” he said.

The man said he grabbed the machine by its screen and raced it to a sink of water to douse the flames, but when he pulled it back out, it once again began to smoulder.

After seeking advice from his brother-in-law, he removed all the batteries from the machine, and soaked it in a sink of water overnight.

Although Dell was quick to replace the machine, he said he was never told by the company what had caused the fault and to this day worries about a recurrence of the problem.

“I’m now so paranoid that will it happen again that I don’t use my laptop on flights anymore. Just imagine if that had happened on an aircraft,” he said.

“The amount of smoke alone would have been a major concern, but if it had actually been on my lap I would have been burned in quite a serious way.”

It turned out that his was not an isolated case. In December last year, Dell launched a massive recall of about 35,000 notebook batteries contained in laptops that were deemed to pose a potential fire risk.

The company said at the time it had received three reports of batteries overheating, and while no injuries were sustained, damage to a tabletop, a desktop, and minor damage to personal effects had been recorded.

It is not clear if the Singapore incident was one of these three reported cases.

Rechargeable lithium ion batteries are believed to present a fire hazard when they are either damaged or suffer a short circuit, but it is not apparent whether any of the latest incidents involved one of the recalled batteries.

In the Japanese incident, a man named Gaston told the Inquirer website that “the damn thing was on fire and produced several explosions for more than five minutes”.

Although an investigation of the incident is still underway, Dell said: “The initial analysis indicates that the event involved a fault in a lithium ion battery cell”.

In the incident reported last week in the US, police and a fire crew attended the office where the laptop spontaneously burst into flames and evacuated the entire floor.

The problem is not limited to Dell laptops. According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, as many as 43 laptop fires have been reported in the US alone since 2001, and the National Transportation Safety Board is currently examining whether or not a recent fire aboard a UPS cargo plane was caused by laptop batteries.