[Ol' Dan Tucker]

Perhaps. Putting a laptop on what appears to be some type of fabric or plastic table cloth wouldn't help with heat dissipation either.

The cause of the the fire was definitely the batteries. The 'multiple pops' are the give-away. Lithium batteries are also sensative to heat, so it's possible that when they over-heated, they went into thermal runaway.

[bwteim]

Thanks, I will file that under the many things I didn't know. I assume majority of laptop batteries are lithium?