By Park Si-soo
Staff Reporter
A laptop computer produced by a major Korean computer manufacturer was damaged Thursday due to an overheated battery.
According to LG Electronics, a graduate student at Hanyang University in Seoul reported Friday that his laptop computer's rechargeable battery had melted.
The company immediately sent a representative to change the faulty part, LG Electronics said. The troubled computer hit the Korean market first in January last year and has been sold only on the domestic market only.
LG announced that it was withdrawing the faulty computer model from Friday, but experts said the measure ― without detailed preventive action ― was no more than a makeshift tactic.
This is the second incident involving an overheating battery.
On Jan. 8, an LG laptop computer being used by a reporter suddenly exploded and burst into flames. Following the explosion, LG Electronics, the PC body maker, and LG Chem, the battery manufacturer, teamed up with the Korea Electro-technology Research Institute (KERI) to find the exact cause of the explosion but failed.
``We put our best efforts into finding the exact cause because similar incidents took place in one month,'' Park Soon-joo, LG Chem's public relations official, told The Korea Times.
``We will investigate the case in collaboration with LG Electronics and another independent institute. The results are expected to come out within a few weeks at the earliest.''
Noting that the exploding Sony battery of an IBM laptop in the U.S. in September 2006 was caused by impurities in the battery, she said, ``We will trace all possible causes of battery overheating including other causes reported overseas.''