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Laptop batteries again?

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28 September 2006 - 12:51pm
Submitted by: sduscheid

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Yes, this time Lenovo/ThinkPads. They announced today that about 526,000 Sony batteries shipped in their various ThinkPad models are subject to recall because of the same over-heating/fire hazards that caused Dell to recall 4.1 million batteries. The models were sold worldwide from February 2005 until September 2006 and include these models:

* ThinkPad R Series (R51e, R52, R60, R60e)
* ThinkPad T Series (T43, T43p, T60)
* ThinkPad X Series (X60, X60s)
* ThinkPad T4x Series or ThinkPad R5x Series systems (in some cases)

If you are running ZENworks Asset Management, you can easily create a custom report to query for these system models and then have users run Lonovo's automated check from this page to determine if the battery is actually subject to recall or
users can enter their battery part number on this same web page to determine if their battery is subject to recall or not.

Either way, it is prudent to create a report of these sytem models and document what steps were taken to ensure that affected batteries were identified and replaced. The auditors will eventually ask for it.




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Doug Emerson's picture

Having to visit the website

Submitted by Doug Emerson (not verified) on 4 October 2006 - 7:23am.

Having to visit the website requires the user to do a lot of the work. I have talked to my reps at IBM and they provided me with a tool they call "battinfo". With the proper switches I was able to run this tool through Zen, and for each workstation it exports a log file to a shared folder. Which I can review and use that info to make my recall requests. The user doesn't notice anything! Here is the batch file I wrote to customize the tool:

copy g:\zenapps\batteryrecall\setup\pwrmgrif.dll c:\temp
copy g:\zenapps\batteryrecall\setup\battinfo.exe c:\temp
copy g:\zenapps\batteryrecall\setup\tppwrif.sys c:\temp

c:\temp\battinfo.exe --unattended --outputfilename g:\zenapps\batteryrecall\data\%computername%.csv

And this is what my results look like:
#Marketing Name Machine Type Machine S Battery Mfg Name Battery Mfg Date Barcode Effected?
ThinkPad T43 2668VAX L3WPGNZ SANYO 12/26/2005 1ZA7K5CT11P NO
(looks better in excel)

So far, I'm finding that 16% of our T43's need to have the batteries replaced. Zen has made this a breeze!

Thanks!
Doug

Martin Buckley's picture

Doug - this is cool - you

Submitted by Martin Buckley (not verified) on 4 October 2006 - 3:31pm.

Doug - this is cool - you should get this on Cool Solutions!

Steve DuScheid's picture

Doug, We are currently

Submitted by Steve DuScheid (not verified) on 4 October 2006 - 4:21pm.

Doug,

We are currently working with Dell on a similar procedure to run their battery check utility (available only from Dell) with ZENworks and gather and report results with ZENworks Asset Management. Check with Dell on this utility (and how to use it with ZENworks products) if you have Dell machines around.

Steve

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