Data Circle

Dell, the American company which manufactures more computers than anyone else in the world, has announced that it is recalling over four million of its laptop batteries because they pose a fire risk due to the possibility of them overheating. Although only six laptops have been reported to have experienced these effects, Dell is recommending that all customers with machines that may be affected return their batteries for a replacement. In the meantime, it is still possible to run the laptops from the mains power even though the battery has been removed.

Personally, I find it quite worrying how many product recalls the computer industry seems to issue, particularly when it comes to batteries. There have been a number of high profile recalls in recent years from various manufacturers, including Dell and Apple. I suspect that a lot of these recalls are due to cautiousness on the part of the manufacturers—after all, one big lawsuit as the result of a fire started by a faulty battery could cost the company more in monetary terms and bad publicity than a recall would—but I would have also thought that more stringent procedures would be put in place to ensure that these problems are not repeated. On the other hand, it might just be the case that manufacturers have got better at detecting defects in batteries and so they are recalling batteries because of problems that would not have been noticed two years ago.

If you want to know if your laptop is affected and how to return it for a replacement, there is a Dell battery program site dedicated to the issue.

Further coverage

• Dell recalls 4m laptop batteries
• Dell Recalls 4.1 Million Laptop Batteries
• Exploding laptops prompt Dell safety recall

Triple Boot on MacBooks Working at Slashdot

The OnMac.net chaps, who shot to fame recently by getting Windows XP to boot on the new Intel Macs, have managed to get triple booting working via BootCamp. In other words, you can now install OS X, Windows XP and Gentoo Linux (other distributions may work, but Gentoo is the one used in the wiki article) on your MacBook and switch between them. At the moment you have to use the NT bootloader to actually boot Linux, but it’s an interesting achievement nevertheless.

Apple Discontinues 15” Powerbooks via Forever Geek

The 15” Powerbook range, on one of which this entry is being composed, has now been removed from the online Apple store, although you can still find the product details on the Powerbook section of the Apple web site for the time being. Presumably this is the first step in Apple’s deprecation of the old PowerPC range of machines as it moves towards placing Intel chips within all of its products.

Found this via Parm on UNaXcess: IA-32 Intel® Architecture Software Developer’s Manuals, available for download or in printed form. Extremely useful if you’re doing any sort of low level development/programming aimed at Intel’s 32 bit processors – somewhat above my level of expertise though.