Sony has been forced to make another product recall. Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Toshiba are recalling 100,000 laptop battery packs, which are made by Sony, after 40 reports of overheating batteries. The ones in question are the Sony 2.15Ah lithium-ion cell batteries made in Japan. These overheat, causing smoke or even flames to appear, with minor property damage. Sony blamed two factors for the defects. One of it is the adjustment on its manufacturing line from October 2004 and June 2005, one which may have affected the quality of the cells in the batteries and the other one is the metal foil for the electrodes.

All of these batteries that are causing trouble are made before 2006. The ones made after 2006 aren’t affected. As a result, Sony claims that 100,000 is a small number considering the fact that the company has sold more than 260 million batteries, which hadn’t caused problems. The bulk of 35,000 affected computers were sold by Hewlett-Packard between December 2004 and June 2006 (The HP Pavilion, HP Compaq and Compaq Presario are in question). Dell models Latitude and Inspiron, which were sold between November 2004 and November 2005, could also cause problems, as well as some Toshiba Satellite and Tecra laptops sold from April 2005 to October 2005.

An interesting fact shows that Sony Vaio laptops don’t use the battery in question. It’s a big relief for the ones who just got back their Vaio’s after the recall of 440,000 Vaio notebooks because of a wiring flaw that can cause overheating. This week, Sony was forced to report a 71% fall in profits for the three months to the end of September, blaming the global economic downturn and the high value of Japan's yen for this.