Dude, your Dell Notebook is on fire!!!

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HAVOC

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http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32550

This is unbelieveable. A Dell Notebook actually caught on fire then exploded a few times.

I worked on a Dell XPS Notebook about 2 months ago. IT suffered from severe overheating with it's P4 Prescott @3.4Ghz. I cleaned out all of the fans and changed the TIM to AS5. Yet the issue continued. We ordered a new battery, because of the recall and the issue continued. We bought a notebook cooler and the issue continued.

So about a week ago, the women I was working for called me to say that it stopped working all together and she brought it to some PC repair place and when they opened it up they found that most of the inside components were chared and melted. So, she was talking to Dell to see what they could do for her. The Notebook is past it's 1 year warranty, but, hey, they aren't supposed to melt.

Crazy...
 
Dell notebooks have a history of running hot. They're built with pretty cheap components all the way around but they really do seem to skimp on the cooling. My old Inspiron 8100 has a fairly loud fan on it and the heatsink on the proc always struck me as inadequate even for a P3.
 
I never understood why the old high performance Inspirons had a fan on the underside of the design. If your working on a surface that absorbs heat fairly well....say a bed, couch, etc then they would typically overheat and shut down due to the temperature threshold being compromised. Made no sense.
 
Hehe :)

Oh my Budda! I'm like Mr. Chatty Cathy today...I'm never in the OT this much while working :)
 
Well, if you look at the pictures on that website i linked you can see it was on fire in the front of the keyboard, which is were the batteries are located. And explosions can really only happen from a faulty battery.

When lithium-ion batteries replaced nickel metal hydride, researchers increased the energy density (the amount of power they could pack into the space), eliminated the memory effect, and made batteries lighter. But lithium ion in most cases uses cobalt oxide, which has a tendency to undergo "thermal runaway," explains Joe Lamoreux, vice president of research and development at Valence Technology. "When you heat this material up, it (can) reach an onset temperature that begins to self-heat and progresses into fire and explosion." ~ An Excerpt from a PCWORLD article.
 
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