If you have a laptop with a Sony rechargeable battery better check if you need to get a refund or a replacement ? or you may find yourself with a fire hazard.

Sony's attempt to deal with the faulty battery problem (detailed in a previous column here) got worse this week when it was forced to extend the recall worldwide to all products that use its lithium-ion battery packs.

Due to a manufacturing problem, the batteries could overheat and burst into flames.

The original recall, made in August, related only to specified Dell and Apple laptops. About 6 million lithium-ion batteries were involved in that recall.

Sony extended the recall to all battery cells made between January, 2004 and February, 2006.

If you are one of the millions of unfortunates, you will have to wait for your laptop manufacturer to announce the recall. Already Toshiba has announced a recall of 340,000 of the faulty laptop batteries, not because they catch fire, but because they fail to recharge. Lenovo, IBM and Fujitsu have stared recalls, with Acer in talks with Sony about doing the same.

So far Sony says it is still investigating whether any of its laptop models ? notably the Vaio ? are affected by the burning battery problem. Aside from the problem batteries, I fault Sony for making it difficult for users to get information on its websites about the battery recall problem. After a long time looking (and I consider myself an expert searcher), I found a Sony site that allows you to input your laptop model and serial number online.

You will then receive an update if your laptop is included in any future recall.

The signup site is at www.sonystyle.com. Go into the Customer Care section and click on the link relating to the battery recall. You will get a popup window explaining the details of the recall.

Sony has blamed the problem partially on the configuration of certain laptops and on its own manufacturing problems. Its investigation found that microscopic metal particles in the battery cells could come into contact with other parts of the cell and cause a short circuit.

While the battery normally powers off when the short circuit occurs, "under certain rare conditions" it may lead to overheating and fire, the company said. So if your relatively new laptop fails to recharge, you may also have a problem.

Some media are linking Sony's move to extend the recall due to one of its ThinkPads catching fire at Los Angeles International airport in September. The fire occurred while the owner was boarding an airplane, and "caused enough smoking and sparking that a fire extinguisher was used to put it out", the US Consumer Product Safety Commission stated on its Internet site.

A photo of the burning laptop is available if you search though the September archives of http://forums.somethingawful.com.

@EDITRULE:

Apple has made updates to two pieces of key software.

Less than a month after the release of iTunes version 7, the company has released an update. Update 7.0.1 "addresses stability and performance issues with Cover Flow, CD importing, iPod syncing, and more", the company says. iTunes to version 7.0.1 was released on September 12 to allow the downloading of videos and films at the eponymous website. iTunes 7 users have apparently been complaining about the many bugs on the original release since then. Last week Apple also released a free upgrade to Aperture, software the company released last year for professional photographers. Aperture 1.5 is a professional photo-management tool and costs $300 if you are a new user.

The new Aperture 1.5 adds a new open library and integration with iLife '06 and iWork '06 software. It includes XMP metadata support, new adjustment tools and an export feature that makes it easy to extend the Aperture workflow to third party applications and services.

Aperture manages Raw, Jpeg and Tiff image formats. The new open library system allows photographers to store image files wherever they want-either within the Aperture library itself, or in other disk locations, including external hard drives, CDs or DVDs. Aperture can now generate high-resolution previews of each image so that users can review, rate and organise them ? even when the master files are offline. The previews allow photographers to keep their original images safely stored on a desktop system at home or in the studio, while still being able to take a compact version of their entire photographic library on the road using a MacBook or MacBook Pro.

Go to www.apple.com/aperture for more information.