Dude, dump your Dell!

This is the second story I’ve heard in the last couple of months about a Dell notebook being on fire; thereby showing us that spontaneous combustion by an inanimate object, previously considered the tool of the sedentary clan – isn’t just something that gearheads scoffed at and desktop vendors prayed for.

(For those who missed the first one; click here for the scoop. Its probably still warm.)

Yeah, yeah – its gotta do with the battery. Yes, I can see how notebooks can be easily and routinely jammed with anything from errant fabrics from clothes or upholstery, or hair, or just good ol’ dust balls. Yes, I can imagine how current notebooks are squeezing in higher-performance processors into smaller form factors, and putting them right next to higher-speed hard drives; and know how great a job these components do of warming the user’s hands after over 30 minutes of “work”. I can also put all the heat equations together to see how a jammed fan and an overheating processor, right next to a hard drive doing 5,400 rpm – can quickly lead to some seriously toasty fingertips and/or the lap / desk underneath.

But nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing – justifies them bursting into flame. And I don’t care if all future Dell notebooks ship with a warning against using them on the lap, like Apple did. What part of “laptop” don’t they get, really?

More flames, and uneducated betting advice, after the jump.

If I were a betting man, I’d place a pile on battery vendors right about now. Consider this:

• Whatever the real reasons were, the world’s “collective wisdom” seems to focus on crude oil as the biggest reason for the ongoing conditions of strife and stress in the center of the map
• Hybrid cars have appealed to the wallet and to the ethics of the consumer. They use batteries.
• I’d imagine that electricity, from whatever source, is the best suited to run our gadget-friendly, portable-computer-cluttered world in the future. The only way to store that, as we know yet, is in a battery
• Given everything the human race has been through over any given period in time, “hoarding” always seems to be a good thing. Food and money usually come first, but if one could, wouldn’t one hoard power as well?
• If you were to look around the average workplace, home or almost any environment in a reasonably urban setting today, you would spot about ten batteries, in various form factors. Airport security may hate them, but we love them.

I would place another pile on LED technology vendors; but that’s another story. All in all, we need the darn power packs a lot more than we know, and all signs seems to indicate that battery technology isn’t really perfect yet. Heck, I’ve had a battery charger blow up in my hands a while ago.

(Don’t fret, there’s a heavy planter on a loose ledge that hangs over a route I frequent…)

Alternatives? I don’t see any. I really don’t see us hand-cranking our cellphones, buying solar-cell-only cars for the commute, or using stationary bikes to power our game consoles….

…unless someone holds a burning laptop to our heads.

Update: A week later, another story ’bout another laptop. From Australia, too. The outback. The land of the great outdoors. So, its not just “us” getting some warped version of poetic justice for being too geeky and indoorsy…