RIP laptop

This isn't Ten Cents, this is just something that happened that I thought was interesting.

Yesterday, I had my old 2011 Dell clunker laptop start smoldering on my lap. It had shutoff randomly, and I made the mistake of turming it back on...

Smoke began to come out of the battery area. I freaked out, ejected the battery, then frantically ran for the fire extinguisher. It had stopped smoking, but it smelled terrible.


This must be Dell's way of making you buy new products.


I ran up to the dining room to tell my parents...


Me: "Hey...um... the laptop nearly caught fire on my lap. It started smoking. A lot.... thought you may wanna know."

Father: "...Okay."


My mother looked at me like I was nuts. My father just sort of accepted it.

I ran upstairs to get my screwdriver to see what had happened, and then they tell me to throw the laptop away.


I took out the hard drive, RAM cards, and wireless cards (there are two for some reason), then tossed the rest of thw laptop into a bag.


The insides of the laptop smelled bad, and I was faced with a single half-charred ribbon cable among otherwise intact... everything else?

I originally thought the battery was venting or something, but it was intact? No weird smells or dings on it, anywhere.



Now it's today, and my father found a used laptop at the office and is bringing it home for me.

But, I've had... ifffy experiences with past laptops from there.

My first laptop ever was a gateway 450sx4, powered by a pentium M (or pentium 2, I forget). It was old, and it ran XP.

That one I dropped one day, and it stopped working.


Then I got a gateway 450ROG. It was powered by a pentium 2 (or M, whatever the first one didn't have).

That one just lost the ability to hold a charge, so we pitched it.


Then we have my Dell, which as I already stated started smoldering. It didn't catch fire, but it was pretty close.



I hope the used one I'm getting isn't a downgrade from what I had, the office hand-me-downs are kinda random.



Have any stories about computer-related mishaps you'd like to share? Fires? Derps? Strange noises? Random part falling off?

Comments

I dropped my old Thinkpad T-61 countless times, not a sweat. Still works great today (amazing analog soundcard) but specs barely keep up (though Windows 10 and Linux runs pretty nicely).
My current laptop was dropped once, had a crack on it. Also the screen hinge got unclipped, but was easily repaired.
Also the darned hard drive lived a grand total of 8 months after purchase. Replaced since then with a SSD, going strong for almost 2 years now.
Meanwhile, my Thinkpad survived with its stock 120 GB HDD, until it simply failed out of nowhere after about 8 years.
 
One of my hinges wasn't physically attached... screw posts broke off :)
 
Oh man, Dell laptops kept giving me nightmares.
Each time I knew someone with one of them, only problems after a short time.
 
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Mine has survived for at least 6 years. Everything from speakers dying to backlight unreliability...

It went up in smoke 2 months after I got those speakers working. Rip.
 
It's probably just a bubbeled battery that started smoking. I smoked batteries before, they smoke like... a lot. But what you can do in most laptops is run them directly of your AC charger. And if it works fine, then it's just to get a thirdparty replacement from Ebay.
 
There was a burnt ribbon cable in a place where I'm pretty sure the battery shouldn't toast it.

The smoke stopped when I removed the battery... I'm still not sure what did it. But I'll watch the battery in the new one more carefully.
 
It can be a whole heap of things really. It's so hard to put the finger and say "This is the reason, and it happened because of this". It can be all from wear and tear, to faulty manufacturing. I kind of hate this new trend even on laptops to keep the battery under a plate that you must unscrew. Like if my battery is about to burst fire. I rather throw it out instead of everything out.
 
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Mine has a slide-latch thingy, I can just rip it out at will. You only need to unscrew stuff to get to the hard drive.

It hasn't failed like this ever, for 6 years. The ribbon cable started frying, and the motherboard around it looked intact (!).

It wasn't on top of a cpu or gpu, it looks as if it just decided to fry on its own. Which is impossible.
 
My MSI laptop has survived everything! I was walking down the stairs and tripped and there it went! Not a scratch on the screen. The only scratch was from my balisong...
 
@nomi20 with my luck and MSi products, it would have self-detonated during flight, cause a blackhole, empty my bank account and leave a hospital bill for the neighbours
 
My story is i wrote a terminate code ( a super-flashy and destructive one) on my old tanky Panasonic laptop and deleted the whole HDD including the partition table. After that i installed windows 7 on it and sold it lol
 
THE RESULTS ARE IN:

This loaner from work is...

another fucking dell. And it's a downgrade from my old one. Core2 duo 2ghz, 2 gigs ram, windows XP.

I have an install disk for 7 pro laying around, Pretty sure it's been used before, the label is gone. I think I know which computer it's on...

...how do I install windows? will the product key thingy work even if it's been used on another pc, or if I use the code from antoer computer that also has the same edition of 7 running?
 
I say loaner when I mean keep... See, we work in the fire alarm business. We have laptops with special programs and setups for programming fire alarm panels.

This one was set up for some old panels that aren't supported anymore. So it's mine now :D

Nope, no good brands.
 
So much pre-installed crap on the old one that it slowed startup down to a crawl. Dell everything. Burn in dell.

This one feels better tbh, even as old as it is. I miss having a widescreen already but the thing was pretty unwieldy.

This is smaller and just feels more compact. And the screen isn't glossy. Yay.
 
happened to one of mine. The motherboard might be dead. Though hard to say u can use ur old hard drive at least.
 

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