OK folks, this is seriously off topic stuff. If you have no interest in the
lives of others, feel free to block this thread. In addition, if you think
I've overstepped the bounds of offtopicness, feel free to killfile me or
recommend to the listadmins that I be forever barred from posting to the
PICLIST. At this moment in time, I couldn't care less.

So, I took my main laptop (not the Toughbook - my main machine was an old
Toshiba thing that someone gave me a few weeks back) into university with me
on Monday (I had a few hours to kill and the comp lab is always full on
Mondays). Found a near-enough empty table near the heater and sat down.
Powered up the laptop, got the usual "lilo starting linux..." and five
seconds later there's an almighty *CRACK*, everyone looks at me, and the
laptop emits a brief puff of smoke and powers down. Dead...

Tuesday morning, I took my Toughbook in with the intention of getting some
work done on the train. Except the battery was dead. Plugged it in to charge
at uni, and the charge light went green almost immediately. The battery was
truly fried.

So fast forward to today. I've repacked the battery, and left it on charge
all day. Pulled it out two minutes ago to check (the battery LED was blinking
red - "Battery is malfunctioning")... One cell pair was at 5.4V while the
rest were at 3.75. Did I run fast? Hell yeah. Did I scramble with the keys to
get the door open? You bet. Did I go flying when I ran down the path to get
away from the house? You guessed it. I did. Flew down the path and went
flying down the path - literally.

This added on to various family matters I have no reason to discuss here.

BTW, bonus points for anyone who can figure out just why that cell had so
much voltage over it. I'm guessing a cell has failed open... Anyone want to
place a sportsman's bet on the outcome of the testing?

Later.
-- 
Phil.                              | Acorn RiscPC600 SA220 64MB+6GB 100baseT
philpem@philpem.me.uk              | Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxe R2 512MB+100GB
http://www.philpem.me.uk/          | Panasonic CF-25 Mk.2 Toughbook
... Pets just die on you, where's the fun in that?
-- 
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