Unexploded Laptop Battery

With the increasing number of stories about exploding Li-Ion batteries in laptops and other devices, I got a little spooked when I noticed my Dell Inspiron 8600 getting unusually hot last week. I shut down Fedora, unplugged the power adapter, and removed the battery. It was really, really hot. But it wasn’t hot enough to deform the plastic casing and there was no sign of smoke. Just to be on the safe side, I called Dell’s tech support line. And here’s where the story gets weird. I got a quick, helpful response. From Dell. Granted this used to be the norm years ago when Dell was a rapidly growing company but not since they outsourced all their tech support to random groups of non-English speaking people who’d never even seen Dell computers.

Anyway, after I got over the astonishment of reaching an actual English-speaking human on the phone, I presented the symptoms exhibited by my battery. They quickly confirmed that my battery was NOT one of the recalled defective batteries. They also determined that my laptop was just over one year old. It has a two year warranty on everything but, you guessed it, the battery, which has only a one year warranty. So the battery wasn’t covered anymore. However, they then asked me a curious question, “was the battery too hot to touch when you removed it?”

Obviously, there could be only one correct answer to this. “Yes”, I said, “it was too hot to touch”. (technically I did touch it but I’m sure they really meant was the battery very, very hot). “Okay”, the tech support person said, “if the battery was too hot to touch, then I’ll have to classify this as a safety issue and not a warranty issue, so your expired warranty doesn’t matter. We’ll have a replacement shipped immediately.” This was last Friday afternoon. On Tuesday a DHL box arrived with a new battery and a return postage sticker for sending back the old one. I popped in the new one and everything is as good as new. Since I’ve posted numerous complaints in my blog about how awful Dell’s tech support has become, I thought it was only fair that I should post some good news for a change. I hope this is indicative of overall improvements and not just a happy aberration.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *