Laptop overheats, vapourises Brazil... almost

Red hot Compaq

Pity reader Rafael Santos, who came home from work, started up his Compaq nc8430 only to find it refusing to start up because the on-board thermal sensor was registering an internal temperature of 5155°C.

To put that into context, the surface of the Sun is, at 5526°C just 371°C hotter than Rafael's laptop. It's not far off the temperature at the centre of the Earth, for that matter.

Here's the pic:

Zooming in a little:

Thank the bearded bloke in the sky it didn't set off the battery...

Now, we're too generous to put it down to Photoshoppery, but since Rafael's home nation of Brazil didn't disappear in a cloud of superheated steam this week, we have to conclude the Compaq was running cooler than stated.

A glitch in the Fedora Linux distro Rafael's attempting to run? Or a monumentally inaccurate heat sensor? We'll leave it for you to decide...