Bought a toshiba equium a60 late last year, and last night was sat browsing motors on ebay when it went pop and died. Ungplugged the power supply and all the other leads (only mouse and adsl modem at the time) but it kept on making a popping and sizzling noise and there was a terrible smell of burning.

case felt cool enough and to my surprise the battery was cold.

I've since powered it back up and it seems OK, i havent had time to try everything but its at least let me on here now(!), check emails and access files, but was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on what might have happened? something fried somewhere,, and enough to kill it at the time. I thought memory chips or processor but as it seems to be running ok so far that's surely ruled out?

Might have been running too hot? If I actually put my laptop on say a duvet cover it will overheat as it blocks the fan outlet.

My laptop has also developed a fault, battery refuses to re-charge now, so I can only work with a power supply- think the battery has had it.

I thought about that but it was on a wooden surface (learned from the time I almost goosed my work laptop by having it sat on the carpet!)

Probably the battery has developed an internal fault and blown its safety fuse. This wil trip the breaker(s) on the motherboard and shut the PC down.

The breakers do reset (hence it working again) but the battery fuse is not replacable, so I suspect the pack is now bin fodder - is it charging?

Or it could have been a capacitor going pop, again this might cause the motherboard to shut down due to the current rush at the time of 'explosion'. The cap might only be a decoupler or somesuch which is not 'critical' to operation but if now duff will change the characteristics of whatever circuit it is in.

edit - the battery fuse is probably your fault flyingscot.