Tastes Like Burning

I'd heard rumours and the occasional substantiated story about Dell laptop batteries bursting into flames but had thought they were just freak occurances, brought on by rare users cooking up meth on the keyboards or soaking their fingers in paint thinner. Well, it looks flameouts are a lot more common than I thought, as Dell is recalling four million laptop batteries, in a move than could cost up to $200 million. Most of the cost will be covered by the manufacturer of the batteries, Sony, who seem to be building quite a reputation for goofs over the last few years. All will be forgiven if the PS3 goes ballistic I suppose, but Sony... doh.

Dell Latitude, Inspiron, Precision and XPS laptops from between April 2004 and July 2006 are affected, which means that my nice shiny new Precision M90 is on the list. The thought of a flaming ball of acid falling into my crotch did not excite me much, so I checked the battery models on the site, and found that I was safe, albeit by a single model number. My battery is a C5447, which is very close to the evil C5446. Rafe has the same laptop, but has refused (so far) to check his battery model number on the grounds that it would make life less interesting. I have put the phone number of the genital burns unit on the speed dial.