
100K Toshiba laptop batteries recalled for overheating reasons - elorant
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3050377/hardware/major-toshiba-laptop-battery-recall-issued-after-faulty-units-overheat-and-literally-melt.html
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godzillabrennus
I remember well when Toshiba did a poor job of putting the desktop version of
Pentium 4 processors into laptops and there were a myriad of heat issues.
Frankly, I've stayed clear since.

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bitwize
I had such a laptop. It had two huge fans on the bottom, weighed upwards of 10
pounds (much of that heatsink), and roared like a jet when the CPU was worked.

It still saw about six years of faithful service.

~~~
marincounty
P25-s607, and mine is still working, it's got to be 13 years old? I still use
it for downloads.

I actually thought it was a well built/designed computer. It was marketed as a
laptop, but the minute I got it home, and set it up, I knew it was my new
desktop. It's got to be the biggest, heaviest laptop they ever made? The only
thing that failed was a hard drive, and it was an easy repair. Meaning they
designed it to be worked on by us.

That laptop has seen a lot of my life. Two failed relationships. Two great
pit/bulldog mixes, and a bullmastiff.

One of my dogs used to lick the screen every once in awhile.

The screens on the fan openings needed cleaning with a vaccume.

I remember buying it at circuit city for $2700

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bitJericho
Just had the (dis)pleasure of working on a Toshiba laptop. And now i get to
tell the customer to check their battery. I'll no longer recommend that brand!

~~~
voltagex_
There are very few brands I can recommend anymore.

For me? Filter by "does this laptop have the service manual available
officially from the manufacturers site?". That instantly gets me down to Dell
and Lenovo (AFAICT).

Everyone else? Unless they need to run Windows I tell them to get a Macbook,
with the AppleCare warranty if they're in a country without consumer
protection.

~~~
woodman
For laptops I stick to Lenovo T-series and Panasonic Toughbooks, I've found
both to be very amenable to end user hardware modification. I don't run
Windows, so unless the manufacturer does something crazy with IME or UEFI -
I'm not worried about spyware.

~~~
newjersey
Does the BIOS have a whitelist of approved parts such as WiFi modules on the
think side? I have a consumer grade lenovo and I'd not recommend it to anyone.

~~~
fpoling
I second that. Once I had a ThinkPad where under Linux WiFi performed terribly
and I could not replace WiFi card to one known to work reliably due to that
BIOS whitelist. So I used USB WiFi dongle. So much or user-serviceable
hardware.

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smilekzs
Can anyone familiar with battery internals explain what are some of the likely
causes that make such mass-produced consumer product go dangerous? Are they
intrinsic to the working principle of the cells?

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cdumler
There is a tension between making batteries that are safe and batteries
powerful enough to support consumer's ever increasing expectations for more
powerful machines. Battery makers have to weight making a battery more devoted
to batter materials (more electrical storage) versus more casing (to control
the contents). It just boils down to chemistry: we're trying to jam a huge
amount of energy into a small place, yet release it in a controlled manor. Li-
ion batteries have a membrane that separates the two side of the battery. If
it has a defect any any manor, it turns into an uncontrolled release.

A 30 watt battery can power a 30 watt light bulb for a full hour. It doesn't
seem like a lot of light and heat, but that is because it is released over the
course of an hour. Now, think about all of that energy being released in ten
seconds. We're talking basically about a 5,000 watt heater trapped into a
little space not designed to dissipate it. It's going to catch on fire.

What's amazing to me about batteries isn't that they occasionally catch on
fire, but how infrequently they do. Modern Li-ion batteries have an amazing
amount of energy density.

