The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has confirmed that Hewlett-Packard Co. has voluntarily called back over 135,000 battery packs of their notebook PCs, after receiving at least 16 reports of overheating with a threat of causing fires.
With four instances of damage from the approximately 85,000 packs inside the US itself, HP has reason to believe that the problem lies in the lithium ion rechargeable packs manufactured between March and September 2004.
Currently the company observes that an internal short is responsible for the overheating of battery cells causing them to melt or even char the laptop casing, raising risks of burns and fires. The packs that are used in tandem with the HP's Pavilion and Compaq range of laptops besides Compaq's Presario and Evo range of laptops are said to bear the bar code series commencing with the letters GC, IA, L0 or L1. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission advised immediate cessation from use of such batteries and for consumers to seek replacement from HP.
The battery is understood to be manufactured a third-party vendor whose identity HP wishes to protect. Insofar the faulty batteries have not caused any bodily damage to users but have caused damage to property. HP, in order to support international customers has even setup a website (www.hp.com/support/BatteryReplacement) to handle their queries besides advising them about the manner in which they may return their batteries to claim replacement. They have advised that customers remove the faulty batteries and use the AC adapters until such time that get their replacement pieces.
Though overheating of battery packs and power adapters is common in many laptop models, this is the second instance this year after IBM in September recalled close to 500,000 ThinkPad i, 390 and 240 series laptop power adapters due to a similar threat. A few years ago Compaq recalled upto 1.4 million laptop power adapters, the highest number, again for reasons such as overheating. But for HP this is the second major laptop related recall in two years after a design flaw causing system locking, blank blue screens or corrupted memories resulted in 900,000 laptops being recalled last year. In the current recall the notebooks with the faulty battery packs were retailed right upto May 2005, almost six months after they were manufactured without any problems being detected.
HP spokesman, Mike Hockey however assured that the recalled batteries represented only a small proportion of those that had been retailed as part of their laptops worldwide, putting the number as "probably less than a week's worth of output at HP". Hockey while reiterating HP's primary concern of customer safety said, "You get the new battery in about 5 to 10 days and then you just have to send in the old battery". However, the company website dealing with the problem appeared to be down yesterday as a result of a flood of queries leaving harried laptop owners pondering over HP's "Server Too Busy" response.
