Acer Recalls Aspire Notebooks for Overheat

If you're the owner of an Acer Aspire notebook, you may be targeted for a recall.

Acer has issued a voluntary safety recall of certain notebooks manufactured before September 15, 2009 due to overheating concerns.

According to Acer:

The affected units are Acer Aspire models AS3410, AS3810T, AS3810TG, AS3810TZ and AS3810TZG manufactured prior to September 15, 2009. In the affected units the microphone cable may overheat when extreme pressure is applied repeatedly to the left palm rest. As a result, the unitҳ case may become deformed and the system may malfunction.Acer has voluntarily instituted a safety recall program to proactively replace the microphone cable in the affected units to eliminate any risk of overheating.

Hit up this page to check your serial number to see if your machine is part of this recall.

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Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.

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10 Comments Comment from the forums

JohnnyLucky

My girlfriend has the same problem when she uses her laptop. She says her laptop gets hot when she uses it while sitting on the sofa in the living room.
Reply
hellwig

JohnnyLuckyMy girlfriend has the same problem when she uses her laptop. She says her laptop gets hot when she uses it while sitting on the sofa in the living room.
Sounds like your girlfriend is blocking off the airports on the underside of her laptop. Sit the thing on a hard flat surface like a book or lapdesk. Setting the laptop ontop of a pillow, or anything else that will choke off the airflow, and pretty soon that sucker will just die.
Reply
cookoy

microphone cable? they must be the very very cheap thin wires. Or very very sloppy soldering work. thought only CPUs, graphics chips, batteries burn up.
Ok, blame it on global warming.
Reply
matt87_50

wow, are you LISTENING DELL AND NVIDIA!! (disgruntled owner of a m1330 with a 8400gs that is presumably made out of mercury!)
Reply
^
What......do you intend to eat your gpu?
Reply
mihaicozac

The mic cable carry very low voltage and current, a short cannot overheat anything, I guess Acer want to hide the real cause of recall, perhaps is something heavier...
Reply
mihaicozac: +1, the voltage carried by the mic line is equivalent to how much electricity the sound in the room can generate by moving the mic diaphragm, since the mic amp is surely on the motherboard, and the post-amp "wires" would be non-replaceable copper embedded in the PCB.
Reply
jerther

mihaicozacThe mic cable carry very low voltage and current, a short cannot overheat anything, I guess Acer want to hide the real cause of recall, perhaps is something heavier...
there must be two wires form the mic: one for the mic signal and a ground.

My guess is that it's the ground that is to blame. Repeatedly applying pressure on the ground wire can skin the wire and make a short with a more current demanding live part of the laptop (battery?)
Reply
jerther

oh and some mics work on 5VDC polarization.
Reply
WyomingKnott

JohnnyLuckyMy girlfriend has the same problem when she uses her laptop. She says her laptop gets hot when she uses it while sitting on the sofa in the living room.Can't resist this: I get hot, too, on my girlfriend's lap sitting on the sofa in the living room. Can't blame the computer.
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