NEC Recalls Desktop PCs After Reports Of Fires

It is not just notebooks that go up in flames, as NEC has issued a desktop PC recall in Japanl after reports of spontaneous fires.After surprising the world with their exploding laptop computers, Japan’s PC manufacturers have now moved on to desktop PCs that also spontaneously combust. The dangerous desktops are all from NEC Japan, the company admitted yesterday, adding that it was in the process of contacting users of thousands of its machines.

A company spokesperson said that so far only two NEC Valuestar desktop PCs had caught fire, the first in October last year and the second just last month. She said that the fault was caused by an element inside the power supply block in each PC and that almost 15,000 computers are affected.

The Valuestar PCs in question were all manufactured between November 2003 and June 2004 for use in Japan only. NEC has issued a recall notice for anyone owning one of the machines, offering to replace the power supply for free.

Considering that Sony’s recall of almost 10 million laptop batteries is costing that company over 50 billion Yen, NEC is probably thankful it has only a few thousand potentially singed customers to deal with.