I smoked my Toshiba laptop

Literally burnt it!


Well, I keep doing this all the time and I’m sure all you laptop users out there do it too, but this is a strange thing that happened last week. I was copying a file from my desktop onto this Toshiba pro M200 and it was a big file, several GBs. I thought I’ll put it to copying and will go downstairs for dinner. I just noticed the laptop was running low on battery. I pulled out the charger from the bag and like I always do, first I plugged the shoe into the wall-socket (yes power was on) and then I plugged in the charger to the laptop.

I think I heard a very minute spark, and the laptop just died on my face. I don’t believe this. I tried all the tricks like trying to boot withough battery, just on DC and what not, but all my efforts went to trash. Finally I decided to give it for repairs but before that I decided to take the data out. It took me quite some effort and finally a friend helped me out to get the hard-trived pulled out. Like any other SATA disk, it got easily configured with my desktop.

I backed up all my data and sent it for the repairs. They took a few days and I just got a call that confirmed that the laptop’s mother-board and both RAM modules got totally fried. Processor luckily survived, and well, some other parts like hard-disk too.

I have never experienced, nor heard of any such incident before. I do it several times a day. Whenever the PC is low on power, I just plug in the charger into my machine, which is already plugged into wall socket, no harm ever done. If any of my reader has heard, read or experienced anything like this, please do share.

In addition, we also keep doing this with other chargeable devices like cell-phones, ipods, shavers etc. Please spread the word and try not to follow the practice of plugging in powered on chargers into your laptops ( I know its still hard for me to do so).

Last but not least, don’t people at Toshiba put a circuit breaker, fuse or something in the battery charger circuit? Even if i plugged in 5000 volts input to the charger slot, it should’ve smoked one IC or something instead of smoking the whole Motherboard. Am I complaining too much?

4 thoughts on “I smoked my Toshiba laptop

  1. Saira

    I'm sorry:

    – For your loss
    – For "enjoying" your misery (as it was really fun reading this post)
    – For commenting here virtually after an year since you've posted it…

    My laptop has some issues with its battery, it runs only if it is connected to a continuous supply of power. So it has to be plugged into the socket all the time.

    I, at times, keep it running on UPS even. Specially during power failures in times of live cricket matches, cricinfo.com and webcric.com goes on 🙂

    So I want to know if it is safe to run my laptop on UPS??? As I dont want to SMOKE mine 🙂

  2. BA

    @Saira: Thanks for your Comment and congrats on getting your comment through here 🙂

    Actually it depends on what UPS you are using. I have ended up smoking different other home appliances on sub-standard UPS units as well like fans and lights and decided to go for a better UPS then.

    In principal, there shound not be any problem at all running a laptop on a UPS. Why dont you try buying a new battery?

  3. Saira

    Thanks for your cooperation in that regard 🙂

    Actually I dont know anything about buying hardwares and all. My bro is Captain in Pak Army and is currently on Basic course in Quetta. Once he returns, after couple of months Insha Allah, I'll buy a new one.

    So till then let me assume, my UPS is a good one. ( I've got my fingers crossed! )
    🙂

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