Hello all. Last night, I had the scare of my life. In bed using laptop and all of a sudden a crackling sound and thick smoke thick wafting in front of me, pouring out of my laptop. Heart pounding I jumped out of bed, pulled the PSU jack plug out, and like a hot potato in my hands, got it off my bed and ran into the kitchen with it and put it down in the sink. No water poured over it, I let it smoulder and the smoke stopped after a few minutes.
My duvet cover right over my legs got burnt and fortunately didn't have time to burn further through do no damage to me.
These are the pictures after I managed to prise the melted battery from its compartment. Thank god this happened while I was here and not out when it was in sleep mode sitting on the bed.
I removed the harddrive, optical drive and one stick of ram and bootedbooted with just the psu to test if the laptop still works. It boots fine. So I'll put back the harddrive and do an Acronis True Image backup.
I bought this battery from ebay at the beginning of the year. It said it's genuine and looked genuine but I suspect it wasn't. My question is, is this purely the fault of a fake battery? Would a genuine Dell battery do this?
I'm thinking of buying spare parts from ebay and transferring the motherboard and screen. New screen bezel, palmrest and base cover because I daren't use this battery compartment anymore. I doubt a battery would even fit now due to melted plastic. I'd also need to buy a new battery. I would only but from Dell now, but they're expensive at about £135.