Dell netbook catches fire

[PhotonWrangler]

No longer limited to laptops, a new netbook experiences a non-passive end of life event...

 

[bstrickler]

...And their legacy continues...

And my friends wonder why I refuse to ever buy a Dell?

 

[Illum]

dell has been trying to eliminate this in the past, by building an internal timer that "expires" the laptop batteries within a year...rendering them inoperable but a few modders here took them apart and the 18650s are essentially brand new

 

[PhotonWrangler]

dell has been trying to eliminate this in the past, by building an internal timer that "expires" the laptop batteries within a year...rendering them inoperable but a few modders here took them apart and the 18650s are essentially brand new

I knew that they used chips in the battery packs and chargers that talk to each other to verify whether the battery pack and/or charger are OEM parts. This drove me nuts when I tried to use a third party replacement charger on a laptop. The machine would throttle down the charge current because it didn't know what kind of battery it was connected to. Makes sense from a safety and liability standpoint but it was aggravating nonetheless. I didn't know that they were implementing a countdown timer to expire the battery though. I suppose they've gathered enough performance data to decide that the batteries were potentially unstable after a year of use.

 

[Illum]

this was one of a few cases reported up here, https://www.candlepowerforums.com/threads/214606

Nope, dell has robbery programmed into their lappys. After about a year the battery refuses to charge, shows dead and says needs replaced. Put in a brand new non-dell battery and it says sorry, can't charge this pack. Proof lies when you go into the startup menu and turn back the clock by a year, turn the lappy back on and voila, mystery dead pack now shows good as new. Hmm. Huge scandal over it, I guess you're lucky if they don't burst into flames lol. My pack worked great up until the day it said sorry you're dead. Cells individually show 3.9v, and charge up nicely to 4.2

 

[bstrickler]

dell has been trying to eliminate this in the past, by building an internal timer that "expires" the laptop batteries within a year...rendering them inoperable but a few modders here took them apart and the 18650s are essentially brand new

Why don't they just use better batteries?! Simpler to do, I would think.

 

[Robin24k]

Is the Mini affected by the battery recall? I don't think it is...

The battery in my Dell Latitude D620 is original and three years old...no such thing as a timer. In fact, all of the batteries in my laptops are over a year old, and all of them report as being healthy in the BIOS and they work fine...