cherydactyl

I *almost* spilled iced tea on my laptop about an hour or two ago. It only got slightly splashed, like a couple of droplets on the screen from what I can tell. But as part of the mop-up process, I unplugged it from its power cord and handed it to illyaa. *Very* soon after that it shut itself down for lack of battery power, to judge by the sound it made when it turned itself off. I thought that was odd.

Later, when everything was clean and dry, I plugged it back in and turned it on. It booted up fine, but the battery light flashed orange instead of green. Actually, it flashed orange - orange - orange - orange - green - repeat. The power meter claimed that the battery was at 0%, which was odd because it had been running on A/C and charging before the crisis. I suddenly got really fearful that something worse had happened. illyaa checked the Dell support docs and forums, and determined that it might be a heat issue, or, later, that it seemed like the battery was DOA.

After some more checking, he found out that my laptop battery was subject to recall...and ordered me a replacement. I had checked for whether my battery was under a recall at some point, many months ago. When I checked, it wasn't listed as having a problem. I swear. They must have expanded the recall at some point. It's only going to take "20 business days" to get me a new battery. Pretty much a whole month. Luckily it appears that I can use the laptop on A/C with the battery removed.

In retrospect, it has been getting drained and shutting itself off right quick when unplugged in the last month or so. I think the battery failed earlier and the crisis just revealed the failure. I think.

I'm just glad I didn't kill my laptop. For one thing, it has my nascent résumé on it.