One word Toshiba
Karma
Toshiba is recalling the battery packs in 39 notebook models over fears they could be prone to catching fire. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) says that the recalled battery packs - built by Panasonic - were shipped in 91,000 notebooks in the US and 10,000 in Canada between June 2011 and January 2016. The …
Out of 41 laptops we have our apprentice workshop monkey has located 12 serial numbers and 10 of them are at risk. The other 2 werent recognised (monkey will recheck next week when he is in) These are 4 year old satellite pros all bought at the same time. New batteries for them will be nice i suppose.
I some how doubt that the "convenient" app would run on a Gentoo Linux install and I can't be arsed to compile up Wine to see if it would. Had to take quite a few piccies of instructions and serial and product numbers and I am now reassured that mine is OK.
Mind you, would I be able to tell the difference between the heat from the usual compilathon and the battery going up in flames? Libre Office compiles seem to come close to melting my trousers.
-- it's original OS was early Vista.
Not an expensive computer, but over its lifespan it's run every 32-bit OS I put on it. Still chugging along, currently with Q4OS, PCLinux, Mint, and Salix in multi-boot. Whatever Toshiba's current rep, I bear much fondness for the dreadful plastic little beast they made in 2008.
Same here - the kids have a 3yr-old C850-1G2. Since swapping out the HDD to an SSD, it still gets 4-5hrs of real use on a charge though.
The manual check tool shows other parameters for G71C******* parts - model range is broken down further (mine's PSCBWE, and not listed), and even then the serial number has to also match. Ah well, no free battery!
I had an HP dv6000 (Intel, Core 2) which suffered from a battery failure, in this case no capacity after previously working fine for about a year.
Surprise, battery recall, 4 weeks later (sea mail) having sent the old battery back ages earlier I got a nice fresh one in the post. Kudos to HP for supporting their antique products!
Also had the same thing with a Toshiba tablet PC, sadly this one got sold on before I heard about the recall. This was the one with the infamous "flaky touchscreen" bug requiring periodic reseating of the 42 way *2 ribbon connectors.
Not-easily-replaceable batteries have the advantage that you are less likely to just bang in some roughly-correct shape mystery-pack bought at a boot sale from a guy who _looked_ honest.
OTOH, easily replaceable batteries mean that when the original battery fails to hold a charge after two months on a brand new Toshiba laptop, they will replace it at the local shop, because even with the 20 minutes of arguing that it was my fault for leaving it on the charger all day at the office, instead of manually managing the charge cycle (Battery Management? We've heard of it), it was easier for them to replace it than it would have been on a sealed unit.
My data point, the other Toshiba laptop I have is a C650D, serial number 7A247044Q
Battery SN is a 6F5100J83A1AAN rev 1.00 V000210180 D/C J0070
Its been quadded with P720 (15W) and also has the thermal mod and runs a *lot* cooler now with fewer glitches.
The graphics chip on this one has clear signs of overheating so this hopefully prevented some damage as before it ran for about half an hour before graphics glitches began showing up.
Just a thought however, some models let you install a non stock battery (ie high capacity) and also many models have one battery between 3 or even more base configurations differing only by screen size and hard drive/memory capacity so this might be a bigger issue than at first glance.