Byte By Bite

Dell Recalls 35,000 Laptop Batteries

by Marv Dealy

Published December 30, 2005

Talk about having a bad computer day – Dell has announced a “bring ‘em on back” of some 35,000 laptop computer batteries that apparently may burst into flame.

According to a story posted on the People’s Daily Online (whadda ya mean, you’re not a regular reader?) Dell sold the batteries in question between October 2004 and October of this year. Suspect batteries include those that shipped originally with computers during this time as well as batteries bought for spares or as replacements.

According to the article, which said that few Chinese consumers would be affected (http://english.people.com.cn/200512/19/eng20051219_229221.html), Dell sold about 22,000 of the batteries in the U.S. In China, Dell says it has “basically confirmed the influenced customers and will get in touch with the clients directly by way of emails and telephones.”

If you’re a United States customer of Dell, apparently you have to contact them, rather than like the program in China where they will contact you if needed. If you have a Dell laptop that might contain one of the suspect batteries, you need to confirm whether your Dell laptop might be affected. Get on over to the Dell Battery Recall web site at https://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/Default.aspx.

The batteries that are possibly involved were sold with certain Latitude, Inspiron and/or Precision computers, and those models are listed at the web site above. I note that when I visited that link I got a warning that the security certificate wasn’t recognized or some such, so I “accepted the certificate” for the one visit only. I’m not sure why Dell decided they needed the information about the defective batteries on a secure web page (note the “s” in the “https” part of the address above).

Normally, secure pages are where you submit personal or financial information that needs to be encoded before being sent over the Internet, such as when you buy something at Amazon.com or wherever.com. The information about Dell’s batteries doesn’t appear to be “secure” in any way, and doesn’t require you to put any information into a form.

Once you determine whether your Dell laptop is one involved – and note the batteries, not the computers, are being recalled – Dell’s web site has an illustration of what part numbers to look for on the battery pack itself. Additionally, there are a number of links to click on for more instructions, and links to contact Dell support in your area (yeah, right), and an address to which you can write, but no phone number.

I clicked on the link which Dell’s web site assured me would help me figure out if a particular battery was affected, and found the following instructions on the new web page: “Please access the user’s guide and print the instructions for specific instructions on removing the battery from your notebook model.”

I’m only guessing here, but I suppose you should “access the user’s guide” prior to the battery catching on fire and incinerating your laptop computer. And while we’re talking about user guides, I know they’re just trying to pass along another dollar to the dear, dear stockholders, but how much did it really cost to provide at least a nominal, printed user’s manual? Both hardware and software used to come with books that were not only quite handy to flip through (no waiting for the dang book to “power up” just open it right up and read away) they also looked good sitting on a bookshelf.

In fact, I have shelves full of books to hardware and software that I haven’t used in years, come to think of it. They still look good, never need a new battery and keep the people who dust busy.

An aside: if I were sitting with a Dell laptop on my lap when the battery ignited, and I tried to put out the ensuing fire with a steaming hot cup of Joe, how many lawsuits would we be looking at here? Or, can you even get a steaming hot cup of Joe anymore?

End of the Year – Numerous columns sprout like early crocus this time of year, some looking into the future and telling us how it will be, others looking at one slice or the other of the past, telling us how it was.

Wired News’ Kevin Poulsen writes of the Worst Tech Moments of 2005, listing first TiVo boxes that erase not only “expired” pay-per-view recordings but free TV reruns as well (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,69918-0.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2). He may need to get out more often.

Poulsen’s next moment comes when the Commerce Department decided not to grant the “adult entertainment” industry its own top-level domain (would have been .xxx). He reports that the Family Research Council got wind of the move and its attorney, one Patrick Trueman, proclaimed “the porn industry would become twice the menace it is today.”

We all know what happens when any special interest group starts using the word “menace.” Poulsen reports that a flood of letters to Michael Gallagher, assistant secretary at the U.S. Commerce Department, influenced him enough that he drafted a letter to the ICANN asking that the new domain be delayed. The speed with which this happened triggered an international effort to wrest control of the Internet’s domain-name system away from the U.S. as it became clear that ICANN was not immune from political whims.

I’m not sure I see what would have been wrong with having an “adult rated” URL – you’d certainly be forewarned before clicking on that there link about where you’re going.

Read more about Poulsen’s picks, which include the shuttle Discovery near disaster, PayPal blocking Katrina aid that had been raised for the Red Cross, Hwang Woo-suk’s apparently false claim to have successfully cloned 11 embryonic stem-cell lines, Sony’s invasion of your Neil Diamond CDs with their Rootkit, Yahoo helping China to imprison a dissident (10 year sentence) and finally Apple’s vigorous lawsuits against several bloggers.

Perhaps more frightening than Poulsen’s review of 2005 is what PC World’s Grant Gross, IDG News Service, writes at PCWorld.com about what Congress faces in the upcoming year.

He lists issues such as the stuff I generally call “bad guy ware” along with other technology-related things including data-privacy, communications law reform, workforce training programs and patent reform. Since Congress only has so much bandwidth to give to hi tech issues (other things like the war in Iraq do take up some of their time, you know), and since it’s also an election year, you can expect the volume to get a lot louder pretty quickly.

Gross says that telecommunications reform looms large, as some say they want to prevent others from walling off their highest speed services for resale to a handful of partner companies. This argument ought to get pretty loud.

Another bill that is election-time stuff would be data breach notification. After the incredible number of very public breaches of databases in early 2005, lawmakers everywhere were determined to “do something,” and you know what that leads to.

Did you know that – last I read – it’s still illegal to feed your horse with a nosebag on Market St. in San Francisco? I realize at the time this made perfect sense but, like so many other laws, once on the books it lives there for perpetuity apparently.

Congress attacked spyware head on last summer with laws making it illegal – we all see how well that worked, so expect more noise from Washington on this, too.

Read more of Gross’s article at http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0,aid,124086,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp

Happy New Year. Even if you don’t believe in the calendar, take the day off