Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:

CRN, citing a source close to the company, has reported that Dell knew about several incidents of laptop charring, burning, you name it, well before last year’s recall, which centered around batteries.

The source allowed CRN to review documentation of investigations into the notebook problems, and the source said that documentation was supplied to Dell executives. The evidence, which included photographs of damaged notebooks, came to light in the wake of reports of one Dell notebook exploding in front of cameras during a conference in Japan. [Source: CRN]

We Say: Some of the examples are:

1. A two-inch hole where part of the case had melted away

2. More than a dozen notebooks where an inch or two of casing had melted away in the right-hand corner above the keyboard and just below the LCD
3. More than one notebook with black charring around the Ethernet port

…And a lot more. Hmmm… think I need to keep a fire extinguisher around my XPS Gen 2?

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About RealTechNews
When blogs became “hot,” we looked at the category and found a gap. Tech blogs were furiously covering gadgets and gizmos and new products from Asia, and the mainstream tech sites were diligently doing product reviews and news items, but no one was really sitting in the middle and bringing the best of both worlds to one place. Enter RealTechNews (RTN). Our mission is simple: We aim to bridge the gap between the informal and mostly amateur-run tech blogs and the polished but often slow and advertiser-supported tech portals.

[tags]notebook,lcd,dell laptop,dell fire,fire laptop,crn[/tags]