Tonight I experienced one of the most unfortunate computing nightmares of my many years dealing with computers. My Dell Inspiron 700m almost caught fire. Smoke began pouring out the side of the machine, the section of the keyboard began to bubble and the screen began to melt. It was my daughter who noticed the smoke emanating from the laptop, which was sitting plugged in to the power strip, just sitting there. I quickly unplugged the laptop and then tried to reboot it. It wouldn’t restart.

After a few tries the laptop did power on, but the screen was dead (only shining a grey light) and the smoke started again, so I shut it off.

I then spent almost 2 hours on the phone with Dell getting bounced around from service rep to service rep. One even hung up on me and never called me back on the callback number he asked for at the beginning of the call.

Finally I got through to a service rep who indicated that Dell would indeed replace the melting laptop, although it’ll be 21 days till i get the computer.

It’s amazing to me how electronics can fail like this. This laptop was never dropped, always well cared for and used on many trips. It only became a full use computer when we moved into our new home and Heather wanted to be more mobile in her computing (rather than using a deskop as Ivy is too mobile for Heather to actually sit and check her email.).

I hope that Dell actually DOES ship out the replacement and we can get back up and running before too much time passes by. Until then I’ll have this BBQ’d laptop on my desk.