Sony recalls 100,000 laptop batteries

It appears that Sony just can’t get it right when it comes to laptop batteries and has issued yet another recall, this time pulling about 100,000 battery packs due to safety concerns about overheating. According to the company, there have been over 40 reports to date of the batteries overheating, with some of them catching fire and causing some minor property damage and burns to the user.

The recall affects around 74,000 notebook PCs sold by HP, 14,400 from Toshiba and a number more from Dell, Acer, and Lenovo. Still, this is only a fraction of a much larger recall of 9.6 million Sony batteries in 2006, which cost the company around 35.5 billion yen ($360 million). The company blames the defect on adjustments to its manufacturing line from October 2004 to June 2005.

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission issued the notice yesterday listing exactly which models are affected. Those with notebooks covered in the recall should remove the batteries from their machines and contact the PC manufacturer for further instructions.