100K Toshiba laptop batteries recalled for overheating reasons | Hacker News Reader

100K Toshiba laptop batteries recalled for overheating reasons

pcworld.com

54 pointselorant16 comments

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.

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.

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

I had many a thermal issue on my similar laptop. I too stayed clear of Toshiba after that experience.

I had a P30 back in the day. I paid a lot for it, maybe 4k AUD, but it was my main machine from my late teens to very early twenties. The thing was stupidly heavy, used to carry it to uni on a 6km walk to the bus stop... something like 5kg with the power pack or maybe even 5.5kg....

Must be why I'm still happy lugging around a MacBook Pro now when mostly everyone I know has moved on to ultrabook style machines.

I remember making the mistake of playing NFS:Underground on it and it lasted 20 minutes on my bed before it overheated and turned itself off.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Supposedly this is no longer the case as of the previous generation (T450*, X250, etc.).

http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/introducing-our-new-product-o...

I forgot about that because I usually go the opposite direction, removing as much as possible in the interest of power savings. For example, disconnecting the 56k modem daughter board will save you 1W.

Upon further reflection, it is obvious that I don't fit the typical use case - ignore me :)

I recommend business grade HP and Asus, and of course apple anything is still a good call.

Other vendors that have had laptop battery recalls: Apple, Lenovo, HP, Dell, Sony... If your vendor hasn't done any recalls, there's a strong possibility they're just negligent about safety (or they haven't shipped a lot of laptops).

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?

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.

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