Is my laptop's battery going to be recalled?

Is my laptop's battery going to be recalled?

Perhaps, but only if your laptop comes from Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba,Compaq Laptop Battery, Fujitsu or Apple. Which covers almost all the main portable manufacturers except HP and, oddly, Sony, whose battery manufacturing plant in Japan made millions of lithium-ion batteries that have now been recognised as a potential fire hazard - so much so that a number of airlines refused to allow computers containing them on board, even in the hold.

Last week Lenovo, the Chinese manufacturer which recently took over IBM's personal computer division, told the owners of more than half a million Thinkpads built between February 2005 and September 2006 to check them to see if they were harbouring potentially dangerous batteries.

This week Toshiba added 500,000 more computers to its existing tally, and Fujitsu said an unconfirmed number of its own machines were affected. Armada M700, Dell added 100,000 to its recall. Two months after Dell kicked off the affair by calling in more than 4m batteries, more than 7m are now affected. All are captured under the umbrella of "Sony's global battery exchange program".

What began as a large but limited recall is now sweeping across the industry, and Sony is talking to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission about whether portable DVD players and gaming devices should also be included. However, EVO N600C,a commission spokeswoman told the FT that only 47 battery fires have been reported out of billions in service.

So why are HP and Sony not recalling batteries that must have been made at the same time as those which are being recalled, EVO N400c,and which one would expect might be at risk from the same manufacturing defect (of tiny metal shards in the battery electrolyte) as others?

HP said in a statement that "to date HP has received no reports of overheating causing a battery failure in Sony 2.4 or 2.6Ah [amp hour] cells used in some ... HP notebook PCs. Sony has communicated that HP should not be impacted by the Apple or Dell replacement programs. HP believes it will not be impacted by the latest Lenovo or Sony recalls."

And Sony itself? The VAIO division is still deciding whether to join its parent company's recall program. The company itself says that the latest additions are a line in the sand, EVO N410c, an end to the fiasco. Unfortunately, we've heard that before - after Dell, then Apple, then Toshiba.

Sony's reputation with millions of laptop owners is in tatters, as customers grapple with the logistics of sending back their potentially dangerous batteries, and the Japanese electronics giant tries the act of metaphorically - and in some cases literally - firefighting.