Dell Expands Battery Recall, Fujitsu Mulls Action


Fri, September 29, 2006

CIO

Dell has increased by 100,000 the number of laptop batteries it is recalling due to a potential fire hazard, while Toshiba said it would take part in Sony’s voluntary battery replacement program kicked off Thursday. Fujitsu indicated that it was also considering a voluntary recall.

Dell said it received new information that caused it to increase its recall to 4.2 million batteries from 4.1 million. It urged customers to visit this site and to recheck their batteries to see if they are affected. The site has received almost 200 million hits since the recall was first announced in August, Dell said.

Dell Latitude Notebook
Dell Latitude D600

The problems affect battery packs containing Sony-made Lithium Ion cells. Sony has discovered that metallic particles in the cells created during the manufacturing process could cause a short-circuit. That short-circuit could in turn result in a fire, depending on the way the laptop is designed.

While the affected notebooks from Dell and Apple Computer, which has recalled 1.8 million batteries, pose a potential fire hazard, Toshiba said its laptops are not in danger of catching fire. It said it was recalling the laptops voluntarily to ease concerns among customers.

Toshiba offered to replace 830,000 laptops, including some of its popular Satellite and Portege models. Fujitsu indicated that it would also be likely to join the voluntary recall, although details had not been announced late Friday in Japan.

Toshiba, and possibly Fujitsu, are taking advantage of a program announced by Sony on Thursday, which said it would conduct a battery-replacement program in conjunction with laptop makers worldwide.

T-Series ThinkPad
Lenovo ThinkPad

One day earlier, Lenovo Group added its name to the list of manufacturers recalling Sony-made battery packs, saying it will recall 526,000 notebooks.

Other laptop makers are expected to follow suit and offer new batteries to their customers, said Takashi Uehara, a spokesman for Sony in Tokyo.

The plan might reassure consumers but will also increase the cost to Sony of the problems.

In late August, Sony said it would incur costs of between 20 billion yen and 30 billion yen (US$170 million to $255 million), but that was only for the recalls announced by Dell and Apple. Sony has not updated investors since then.

Its battery problems began in October last year when Dell approached the company about a possible problem involving Sony Lithium Ion cells used in battery packs in Dell laptops.

Sony changed its manufacturing process to lessen the chance of metallic particles being left in its products, but it wasn’t until August this year—after several well-publicized cases of Dell laptops catching fire—that Dell began recalling batteries.

Continue Reading

Images captured from conventional surveillance systems are often very poor. But recent advances in digital imaging technology, computers, and networking hardware make it possible to usher in a new level of performance. With a system that leverages the latest technologies and that is designed from end-to-end with the goal of capturing and preserving image quality, the Avigilon High Definition Surveillance System achieves unmatched performance.
Everybody's heard the cliché, "the network is your business." But that's not going to help you choose the best wide area networking service to meet your diverse needs
Learn how your answer to this question compares to your peers by taking this quick poll. See how your peers are dealing with the challenge of ensuring a highly capable server infrastructure as technological shifts impact the application server platform.
With increasing data growth, comes increased need for data security.  The existing DLP model, with a focus on compliance/enforcement is not sufficient as the data discovery and classification capabilities are not granular enough.  Read this paper to find how you can efficiently and accurately manage your risk by rapidly inventorying and classifying your data and then developing remediation workflows that support business needs. 
This paper breaks down attack sources into four categories: external, malicious insiders, accidental insiders, and unknown.
The rapid growth of data and technology is creating challenges for organizations as this digital data is considered to be business communications and must be preserved according the same industry-specific regulations governing the retention and discovery of emails and more traditional forms of electronic communications. This paper examines the role that Data Loss Prevention ("DLP") technology can play in helping organizations address the challenges of locating information in response to electronic discovery.
As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.
Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn about VMware customer, Navicure, and their experiences testing and evaluating the recovery manager, their progress in implementing it in their environment and their advice other customers considering using vCenter.
Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business
VMware recently announced VMware vFabric™ Data Director, a new database deployment and operations platform that enables enterprise IT organizations to offer database as a private cloud service. Built on top of VMware vSphere 5, vFabric Data Director enables IT organizations to ontrol database sprawl through automation and consistent policy enforcement and accelerate application development cycles with self-service database management. Attend this webcast to learn how vFabric Data Director can help you build database-as-a-service in your datacenter.
A simple, cost-effective disaster-recovery solution for virtual environments is high on the agenda for IT organizations as they virtualize more business-critical applications with VMware. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager-the market-leading disaster-recovery product-ensures the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides centralized management of recovery plans, enables nondisruptive testing and automates site-failover processes.
Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often too expensive, complex and unreliable to meet business requirements. As a result, IT departments are hesitant to expand disaster protection beyond their most critical applications, largely because they are uncertain whether the quality of the protection is really worth its cost. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5 is the market-leading disaster recovery product that addresses this situation for organizations of all kinds. It complements VMware vSphere to ensure the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications.
Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter
  1. View all Newsletters | Privacy Policy
Resource Center