Blown lithium battery
A lot of buzz on the interwebs about Samsung mobile phone batteries. Whilst Samsung devices do seem particularly problematic, it can be an issue with lithium polymer batteries generally – especially the super skinny type. They really don’t like getting hot.
I confess I documented this repair rather badly but I did remember to capture a few snaps, fortunately. A few months ago, we noticed the back was bursting off my wife’s Clevo N141ZU skinny GNU/Linux laptop. When I removed the back casing, this is what I found…
So I removed the battery immediately. It proved a somewhat fiddly job to get it out – I lost count of the tiny screws that needed to be removed. And it was out-of-warranty, of course. Red ellipse shows where the battery goes…
I found a replacement on Ali Express for fifty quid including VAT – just over a third of the price that it would have cost from a European distributor. Which of course meant that she had to run it on mains power for a few weeks.
Eventually the replacement battery pack arrived and I fitted it. The machine now works fine. It even sits flat on the workbench again…
In fairness, my wife tends to use laptops as lap-warmers. She often has four YouTube windows running, monitoring her favourite stork nests, and she rebuilds her Gwenview thumbnails and browser cache every session. So it was getting a tad warm at times! 🙂