14 DAY TRIAL // It was reported on a Dutch web site that another Dell notebook caught fire while its owner was on a trip to Hungary.
Maybe because he was on a holiday, Jeroen Ewout didn't know that he should call the guys down Dell's call center and return his Latitude (a D610 D510) that also had defective batteries. But the Dutch knew what to do and got the notebook into a bucket full of sand to stop the fire hazard.
After this Impossible Mission was accomplished, our pall called Dell and the company gave him a brand new and hopefully flawless Latitude.
If you didn't know, several Dell notebooks have gone wild lately because of their defective batteries. Therefore, Dell officially announced last week that it will replace all the problematic laptops with some flawless ones. "Consumers should stop using these recalled batteries immediately and contact Dell to receive a replacement battery. Consumers can continue to use the notebook computers safely by turning the system off, ejecting the battery, and using the AC adapter and power cord to power the system until the replacement battery is received," a Dell representative said.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Dell announced in a press release the recall of no less than 4.1 million batteries used in conjunction with the company's notebooks. The reason ?"Dell-branded lithium-ion batteries made with cells manufactured by Sony" that could overheat and produce a fire hazard.
It has been not revealed the estimated financial loss the company will face because of this incident. "We would expect it to have no material impact on our financials," Dell's chairman Michael Dell declared on the occasion of a conference held by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. "We have been working very closely with Sony to understand what occurred in the process during the period of contamination and to understand what counter measures they have taken. We are confident that they have taken the right counter measures and the process is now secure."