Due to the potential of overheating and a resulting fire Lenovo, a global developer, manufacturer and marketer of PC products and services, announced a recall of around 100,000 laptop batteries. This marks the second recall for the company in six months.

The company urges customers to stop using the recalled batteries immediately as dropping them in a certain manner could cause the overheating problem, and until a replacement battery has arrived you should power down your notebook and remove the recalled battery. Powering your notebook should only be done through the AC adapter during the interim according to the notice, although the Lenovo states a small drop will not cause the problem. “If you have it in your hand and it goes one or two inches and hits the ground, that’s not going to do it,” Mr Gorman said. “It has to be maybe desktop height.”, said Lenovo spokesman Ray Gorman.

Despite an potentially serious danger not to mention a huge inconvenience for Lenovo customers…again, some analysts feel this recall should not have a negative impact on the company. “I don’t think at this point it negatively affects the company given last year there was practically an industrywide recall based on the batteries,” said Martin Kariithi of Technology Business Research.. “It’s not likely to have an impact on earnings because the manufacturer pays for the costs of a recall.”

Lenovo is offering the replacement batteries free of charge for the recalled items. To determine if your battery has been recalled Lenovo has offered two options. The first is an automatic detection by certain notebooks and can be determined simply by viewing this page. The second option allows you to make the determination by entering the battery part number into this form.

Reuters