My laptop caught on fire

No, that is not my laptop. But my laptop did catch on fire a couple of months ago. I was too embarrassed and shocked to tell anyone about it because I couldnt figure out how or why it happened. Until now...

One day, I unplugged my laptop to surf outside in the living room. I noticed some smoke coming from the side vent of my laptop. As I looked closer, I saw a glow of orange. As I looked into the vent, I saw a small flame! I immediately ran outside and blew the flame out.

I thought at first it was a defective laptop. But as I searched online, I couldnt find reports of the same issue on my Dell XPS m1330. Not to mention this laptop is high end line of Dell's laptops. Luckily it was under warranty so I got a new replacement. In any case, I was mad because it could have burned down my entire house.

Last week, I was in my study surfing the Internet on my desktop. When all of a sudden my laptop which was charging, all of a sudden started up by itself. My laptops are always set to hibernate, when I close the laptop lid. So it was a true surprise that something was waking up my computer from hibernate as this should never happen...so I thought. It turns out that I had set my Windows Update to automatically download/install updates on Monday's at 10pm which was the cause of my computer waking up from hibernate. I can imagine it waking up my computer from sleep, but not hibernate.

So it turns out Microsoft is at big fault for this one. First of all, a computer should never wake up from hibernate by itself. I dont care what kind of important Windows updates are needed. Secondly, if you are going to force my computer to wake up, you better make darn sure that you can put it back into hibernate after you are done. And thats exactly what happened to my laptop. Windows update woke up Vista to auto install updates. But after doing so, it failed to put it back into hibernate and probably kept trying for hours which caused the CPU to get hot and intense. I've seen this behavior with my work laptop before. My work computer is set to sleep when I close the laptop lid. Sometimes, I close it and put it in my laptop bag. When I get home, I find that my laptop extremely hot because it failed to sleep.

Bottom Line:
If you have Vista on your laptop and use hibernate or sleep and have it plugged into a power source, make sure you do not use the 'Install updates automatically' setting for Windows Update. Otherwise, you can burn your entire house down.

Source

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