I traveled back home for the holidays. Laptop worked fine there. When I returned I notice I got one of those TSA fliers saying they opened my bag, and I noticed my laptop was in a different spot in the suitcase. Might be just coincidence but once I got back home and powered the thing on, I got this loud clicking sound. I powered it down and turned it back on a few minutes later. Clicking noise gone but now all my games run like ass. Lots of slow down paired with choppy audio always after a couple minutes. Makes games I was playing basically unplayable.
You’re not supposed to put devices with lithium ion batteries in checked luggage in the first place… You literally get asked about that when you check your luggage. An LI battery burst at 35,000 feet in the luggage compartment is going to cause a disaster at some point.
Well I guess lessons learned there, and an object failure of systems, since my laptop came out at the other end, but worse for ware.
What did they do. Take it out of the suitcase, zap with a device, suplex it for good measure, then stuff it back into the bag and call it a day? 0.000000033 percent chance of bringing down the plane anyway.
To re-focus, the issue is particularly annoying because the PC otherwise works perfectly, and I upgraded some parts in August. It now runs worse before that once I’m in-game and the audio chop is irritating.
Nothing comes up looking at task manager/processes/performance/device manager. Updated drivers. Nothing changes.
I do suspect hardware, which feels like the worst problem to have with a laptop. It’s just weird there isn’t anything I can point to.
Sorry to hear about your problems. I would never check in my laptop, not because of battery safety issues, but because I would be concerned about something getting damaged or my luggage being lost. I keep my laptop on my person at all times.
Well, also, stuff gets stolen from luggage all the time.
Y’all wouldn’t dismiss the safety issue if you’d seen an LI fire; I saw a cracked drone battery go up and it was insane. Your battery could easily get damaged with how luggage gets tossed around. And Google Valujet if you want to see what happens with cargo hold fires.
Risk your own life all you want, but to dismiss the potential danger when you have 100+ fellow passengers is frustrating. I had no idea people were still leaving laptops in checked luggage in 2023.
Well, that video scared the crap out of me! Looking around, hmm, I see three Kindles, two (active) cell phones, two (active) tablets, three rechargeable flashlights, one watch, two razors, and a host of smaller doo-dads, more or less unused small devices with rechargeable batteries, and goodness knows what else (like toys or whatever).
TSA put the laptop back in the suitcase and it was on the plane in the cargo hold. If the potential danger was there, why did they do this?
In other news, my CPU is on fire as soon as I launch a game, hence the thermal throttling. Undervolting, underclocking, and disabling turbo do nothing to prevent this. So I guess the fan/heatsink is dead. Replacing the fan is kind of difficult with this old laptop. Sigh.
So far only one crash has been directly attributable to LI batteries, UPS 006. And that was a palette of 81,000, admittedly a bit more than a few people cavalierly ignoring the ban on LI batteries in luggage.
But after that numerous tests were run and airline bans of LI batteries in cargo holds on passenger flights went into effect.
So I’m sorry your laptop was damaged (definitely sounds like the cooling hardware), but hopefully this experience will result in you carrying it on the future.
