During recent years, it was easy to notice a pattern in Sony’s product recall activities. Mainly, the Japanese corporation has had some trouble with their battery lines. The total of recalled battery and battery-related products is in the millions, and it has lead to a decrease of trust in Sony’s product quality, work ethic and integrity.

The latest recall was of 100,000 Sony battery packs, a quite worrisome number, as only last month, Sony recalled 438,000 batteries for the Vaio line. The battery packs were lithium-ion and were recalled not only by Sony itself, but also by five other companies.

The problem was similar – the batteries were a safety risk due to overheating. On Friday, the day of the recall, Sony announced that the five companies affected by the battery-pulling effort were Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo and Acer. Some complaints over the batteries involved customers accusing smoke and even flames as a result on the overheating.

Needless to say, the customers’ laptops were destroyed in the process, and many were unaware that the batteries were designed by Sony, and not by the same company that manufactured the laptop.

The notice released by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commision announced the voluntary recall which applies to a series of 2.15 Ah lithium-ion cell batteries made in Japan.

Sony also provided details about the targeted batteries, which have a barcode label beginning with A0, L0, L1 or GC that were shipped with HP Pavilion dv1000, dv8000 and zd8000 models; with Compaq Presario v2000 and v2400 machines and with HP Compaq nc6110, nc6120, nc6140, nc6220, nc6230,nx4800, nx4820, nx6110, nx6120 and nx9600 computers. The two most affected companies are HP and Toshiba, the first with about 74,000 PCs and the second with close to 15,000 notebook PCs. Toshiba’s recall involves 3,000 Satellite A70/A75, P30/P5, M30X/M35X and M50/M55 laptops and Tecra A3, A5 and S2 computers, while Dell will recall its OU091 battery found in the Latitude 110L and the Inspiron 1100, 1150, 5100, 5150 and 5160 computers.

The CPSC stated that consumers should take the announcement very seriously and stop using the recalled products immediately. Also, they should contact the manufacturer as soon as possible and demand the replacement of their battery.

So far, there have been 40 reports of overheated laptops, with four of them causing minor burns to their users. Also, there have been 21 cases of minor damage caused by fires and overheating.