Journalist’s LG laptop catches fire

One would think that the least-mechanical part of a laptop computer would be the least prone to problems but that has not been the case in the past few years when it comes to the battery.

Unfortunately, another laptop has caught fire, due to its faulty battery, and this time it hits a littler closer to home for me as the computer belonged to a journalist, like me.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that the journalist was on assignment at a hospital when colleagues noticed smoke coming from a computer bag, and some quick thinkers took the bag outside, where it exploded into flames. Talk about a hot story.

Apparently, the computer was made by LG Electronics Co., and was running on a battery made by LG Chemical Co. The fire occurred Tuesday in Icheon, southeast of Seoul, Korea where the reporters were covering the aftermath of a warehouse fire that killed more than 40 people on Monday, the WSJ also reported.

While this is the first battery-fire problem for LG, a number of incidents have plagued the laptop industry as of late.

In October, having been hit hard by instances of global financial turbulence and the fallout from a swath of battery recalls, Matsushita reported lackluster results for its fiscal Q2 and first half of the fiscal 2008 ended September 30.

Last August, Nokia issued a recall of 46 million Matsushita-made cell phone batteries due to an overheating threat.

Matsushita is not the only Japan-based battery maker that has made a manufacturing mishap related to batteries of late. For over a year, Sony has been dealing with the fallout from a defective batch of lithium ion batteries for notebook computers that are similarly subject to overheating. The fire hazard posed by the defective batteries has triggered large-scale recalls over the past year at Dell, Apple, Lenovo, Acer, Toshiba, among others.

–Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor