Sayan Chowdhury, a 34-year-old MNC employee, was found dead in his bedroom Nov 6, where he had dozed off while working on his laptop.
The laptop and the charging cord were found partially burnt.
According to the autopsy report, he lost his life either because of overheating of the battery which caused a fire, or electrocution or carbon monoxide poisoning.
This incident bears an uncanny similarity with the case of 25-year-old Arun Gopalratnam, an MBA graduate, who died June 4, 2010 in a tragic fire in Wisconsin, US. The blaze was reportedly caused by his laptop when it overheated on his bed while he slept, because it had not been logged off.
Investigators found that the laptop's positioning on the bed had cut off air from its cooling fan, overheating the set, which sparked the fire and produced carbon monoxide, killing Gopalratnam in his sleep.
Similarly, an overheated laptop also killed a 56-year-old man in Vancouver, Canada. The unnamed man fell asleep with the computer still logged on. His laptop's placement on the bed had cut off its source of ventilation, causing the lithium ion battery, a relatively new technology, to overheat and burst into flames that proved fatal for him.
Being lightweight and portable, users prefer to take their laptops to bed to work, surf the net or watch movies, until they fall asleep in the wee hours without logging off, even as the batteries overheat and start a fire.
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