Dells recalling batteries....again

[morganlefay]

Heads up for you Dell users.....


http://news.com.com/Dell+to+recall+o...3-6105486.html

The recall affects certain Inspiron, Latitude and Precision mobile workstations and XPS units shipped between April 2004 and July 18, 2006. Sony manufactured the batteries that are being recalled, the representative said.

and I just replaced a dell battery..............wonder if thats on the list?????

MLF

[bagggi]

i gotta tell my friends......

some 14 of them bought dell laptops between sept 05 to march 06. and know what.....i recommended the piece. oh man they are goin to kill me.

how is dell informing the users/customers. i bet none of them know till now. as if they did they would have come to me first. i am letting everyone know.

thanx

[Mystery Man]

WOOO......... EXPLODING LAPTOPS !!

Well its kinda serious ! Are they going to replace the affected peoples laptops ?

This brings about a question on the testing that goes on before the product is launched. Doesn't it ?

[nihil]

Hi there Mystery Man (happy Independence Day )

As Morgana~ said, this is not the first time. Similar misfortunes have also befallen HP and Apple to my knowledge.

The problem is that the battery is a "bought in part", and one is very much dependent on the quality control and quality assurance of the external supplier.

If a bad batch gets out, then the manufacturer's quality control may not detect it. Unfortunately the margins in IT hardware are so low these days that testing is nothing like as rigorous as it used to be

In the old days you would "soak test" (run continuously for 72 hours) and stress test (run under maximum load), a reasonable sample.............. these days they cut corners....................

It is not the product that is at fault, just a replaceable component.............

[morganlefay]

I think another issue may be the safety of Lithium batteries as a whole...as they are used in several products...such as cell phones and digital cameras.

Personally...I think that the heat of the laptop and the combo with the battery is causing the problem

But I did see on the news last night how some cell phones have had this issue..

As Nihil said...it comes down to the testing of these products....

the batteries were manufactured by sony....could be the combo with the dell components....and who is ultimately responsible..???

MLF

[dalek]

Not sure how legit the truck one is,(the one with the Ammo) but I did catch a bit of the news last night where a guy left his laptop on the seat of his pickup and the thing exploded and burned his truck.Lol...Hope Dell has shares in the Auto industry....

Dell has been bedeviled by reports of burning laptops in recent months. In June, a Dell notebook burst into flames during a conference in a hotel in Osaka, Japan. In July, firefighters in Vernon Hills, Ill., were called to the office of Tetra Pak, the food processing and packaging company, to extinguish a notebook fire hot enough to burn the desk beneath it.

That same month, a Dell notebook in the cab of a pickup parked alongside Lake Mead in Nevada caught fire, igniting ammunition in the glove box and then the gas tanks. The truck exploded. “A few minutes later and we’d have been coming up out of the canyon when the notebook blew up,” said Thomas Forqueran, owner of the laptop and truck. “Somebody is going to wind up getting killed.”

....Ammo...lol, must be killer Dell Commando's....

Source

[nihil]

I think that the problem is that most lithium batteries use metal oxides (e.g. cobalt) which are inherently unstable and liable to thermal runaway.

There is an alternative: http://www.valence.com/saphion.asp but I guess that it is more costly.

Using phosphates instead of oxides would probably result in you needing a slightly larger and heavier battery, but there does seem to be a marked improvement in its working life.

There is a safety video on the valence site...........one of the tests is to shoot the battery!

[Ghost_25inf]

Yeah my company is deploying these laptops right now over 3000 of them and most of them have the recall. Dont know what they plan on doing as are they going to replace just the batteries or are they going to replace the entire laptops. Who knows. Hey why not send all the defective laptops overseas to the enemy and save us the issue of finding the terrorists

[kr5kernel]

They are onyl replacing the batteries...Of all the dell laptops at work MINE was the only one affected!

[ShagDevil]

(e.g. cobalt) which are inherently unstable

Sorry, I could have sworn you said Cobol programmers are inherently unstable.
(before any old programmers get their panties in a bunch, I used to be mainframe programmer so shaddap)