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Lenovo and IBM have recalled more than half a million batteries installed in ThinkPad portables after one of them caught fire at Los Angeles airport.

Lenovo, which acquired the ThinkPad brand when it bought IBM's PC business in 2004, said that between five and 10 per cent of ThinkPad notebooks sold during the period of February 2005 to September 2006 are affected. Sony has agreed to financially support the recall.

Lenovo says it will offer customers free-of-charge replacement batteries for all recalled batteries. The place to check is www.lenovo.com/batteryprogram to determine if a battery is affected by the recall. Lenovo states that if customers prefer to call a Service Centre, a worldwide list is available at its website.

This latest alert brings the total number of batteries that have been recalled to more than five and possibly six million. Both Apple and Dell commenced replacement programmes last month; Dell alone has shipped 4.1 million of the faulty units.

All the recalls are related to a manufacturing fault identified by Sony,

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, where small metal particles have been deposited within the battery cells, causing them to short circuit. However Lenovo said that its batteries are materially different to those shipped by Dell and Apple.

'Our battery packs are designed differently and our systems charge differently than other products which have recently been affected by a recall,' the company said in a statement. 'These designs offer some protection but we have concluded that they cannot entirely compensate for the possible presence of metal particles in these battery cells.'

This may go some way to explaining why there have not been widespread reports of overheating ThinkPads, as there were with the Apple and Dell machines.

'Since our competitors' problems with batteries became public, we have been conducting our own assessments of batteries in Lenovo products and working with Sony and other third parties to determine if Sony batteries in Lenovo products presented any risk,' the Lenovo statement continued. 'Even though our current failure rate continues to remain below historical levels, and we continue to investigate reported incidents, we believe it is prudent to initiate a voluntary recall of these batteries at this time in the interests of public safety.'

Sony expects the replacement programme to cost between $170 and $260 million dollars. Its share price has fallen by almost nine per cent since Dell announced the first recall.

Following the initial recalls, Apple, Dell, HP and Lenovo agreed to meet to discuss the creation of a new standard for battery manufacturing. The IEEE, an international body that oversees electrical standards, has also announced that it has begun work on the IEEE P1825 standard for the design, production and evaluation of lithium-ion and lithium-ion polymer batteries.