I guess I should *not* have gotten a Dell...

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

An inquire reader was at a Japanese conference when a Dell laptop suddenly exploded a few feet away from him. Fortunately no one was hurt.

 

bloody hell!! I always thought Dell were crap but I never thought that could happen !

Yakumo

 

hmm thers not much what can bring a laptop to explode in my laptop the cpu heat is transported with some kind of heatpipe to a fan maybe the fluid in the heatpipe got to hot a and the material was bad so the higher pressure did its thing ?

ahh did read the ac changer could have been faulty maybe the condensators blowed up

 

PSU maybe? I've heard a lot of reports in desktops that PSU's have exploded making a sound of a 45 Cal. But a laptop...Yikes!

 

The laptop was on a cloth table. It just overheated and caused it to combust. All new Dells from Pentium3 lappys and up have a seperate PSU.

 

Good thing I got rid of my Inspiron 8200...traded it for a Kasumi Xbox :icon_bigg

Dell sucks as far as Tech Support, as it took 3 different calls to diagnose a bad mobo (the first two calls were worthless level 1 "techs" in India who were barely understandable and had no clue what they were doing and definately were following a script) on the damn thing. I did have the power pack die on me...nothing like the smell of burned out transformer.

 

I can almost guarantee that it was the battery that exploded. It could have happened with any laptop, especially if the tablecloth was blocking the cooling fans.

 

HA HA HA HA HA!

"Dude, you're getting third degree burns!"

 

that is why my company went with IBM.

 

We have about 4500 Dell desktops and about 700 Dell laptops, and have never had anything "explode" other than a capacitor on a desktop, which Dell admitted was a manufacturing error and they stuck the wrong rating capacitor on some of the motherboards.

 

Obviously this is a one off/user error, otherwise you can bet you'd have heard of the recall. They did for the PSUs recently, doubt this is related since those are external.

 

In a case like this the specific brand doesn't really matter. As Marisil pointed out this is most probably a battery issue and not something that is specific to Dell. Apple's been having issues with its batteries recently, and IBM and Toshiba have in the past. More or less, any company that's been around for a while and makes laptops has had some sort of battery issue at one point.

Another possibility is that the user was using a cheap, aftermarket battery instead of an original OEM solution. Many times the cheap replacements aren't up to snuff and it would be silly to blame a problem like this on the laptop manufacturer if indeed the fault was with a poorly made battery and not the computer.

Sure makes for good photos though!

-hl718

 

wow i thought this could never happen. But i agree with many on this board, dell is such a poor brand. Your really better off just building your own comp these days. As for laptaps, im not sure what would be a good brand.

 

I was reading this with my Inspiron 630m on a cloth table. It's amazing how quickly one can duck for cover when you feel the need.

I scared my cat.

 

The parallel port on the Dell laptops I have testet don't support EPP 1.7, EPP 1.9 nor EPP+ECP or any other EPP modes. Only SPP, ECP and PS/2-style bi-directional. I know that software like Elim can emulate EPP mode, but have found no way to force the port itself to be EPP in hardware.

So if you plan to use the parallel port a lot, be aware that your devices might need to support other modes than EPP.

CF

 

hahaha! owned!!

that's so sad, that's not even funny anymore

btw, where are you working, that you need 4500 desktops???

 

I've read somewhere that it wasnt a Dell Laptop, but another brand entirely.

 

I never had too much problem with Dell Laptops, but the desktops and service are horrible. You really couldn't do any major upgrading due to the type of RAM it required and the lack of any ports. They also tried to charge extra on my payment plan near the end when there was never a delay in payment, and then forced me to speak to some financial support overseas somewhere that couldn't even help me in the first place.

Yeah, stay away from Dell. For laptops, HP or Toshiba does fairly well, and Desktops usually are best made yourself if you have the skills.

 

I have a couple of Dells not bad for systems but their payment plan will kill you if you do not watch it. I found on my buisness account that they would ask for less than what the interst was each month thus creating an account you would never pay down.

 

Yep. They make more money that way if you keep paying the minimum. Interest just keeps accruing every month and before you know it, you essentially paid $2,000 for a $500 PC if you're not careful enough.