Yahoo! guest's Dell laptop goes up in
smoke
By Tony Smith [More by this author]
21st September 2006 10:57 GMT
Days after a ThinkPad decided enough spreadsheets already and
committed suicide in spectacular fashion at Los Angeles airport,
yet another Dell notebook has joined the list of self-immolating
laptops, this time at Yahoo!'s US headquarters.
The Dell machine, pictured below and taken by by Flikr user Stewart
- there are many more to view at his website - appears to have been
brought on campus by a visitor. A report on Engadget suggest Yahoo!
has an HP- and Apple-only purchasing policy, though the company has
not yet confirmed this.
The battery burn-out at LAX - pictured here at website Something
Awful - was a Lenovo-branded ThinkPad T43, the manufacturer has now
confirmed, Cnet reports.
Lenovo's laptop ships with batteries made by Sony - the battery
maker whose products were last month the subject of the recall of
5.9m power packs from Apple and Dell notebooks. However, Lenovo has
not yet confirmed that a Sony battery was installed in the machine
that caught fire at LAX. The incident took place this past
weekend.
Lenovo has made it clear in the past many of its machines ship with
Sony batteries, but unlike Dell and Apple has announced no product
recall. A company spokesman told Cnet that Lenovo had "not seen an
unusual number of incidents involving its notebooks and Sony's
batteries".
Earlier this week Toshiba asked 340,000 customers to return their
Sony-made laptop batteries, though it insisted this was in on way
related to the Dell and Apple recalls.
Meanwhile, Virgin has become the latest airline to ban the use of
Dell and Apple batteries during flights. Will, we wonder, the Los
Angeles airport fire herald tougher restrictions before and during
other carriers' flights?
Yaa....Hoooo...... 
