Toshiba, the Japanese electronics group, is to recall and replace 340,000 faulty batteries manufactured by rival Sony and used in its laptop computers, the third product recall suffered by Sony in just over a month.

Toshiba has said it will replace for free the batteries installed in eight laptop models produced between March and May this year and shipped to Asia, Europe and North America.

Toshiba said the potentially affected batteries were sold with several notebooks in the Satellite, Satellite Pro, Equium and Tecra Series as well as being sold as accessories.

Customers can identify potentially affected notebooks and optional batteries here.

The latest recall from Toshiba brings the total Sony battery count to nearly 5 million, following the recall of 1.8 batteries used in computers made in Apple and 4.1 million used in machines made by Dell, the world's largest computer maker amid fears they could catch fire.

Sony will shoulder most of the cost of those recalls, expected to be as high as $257 million, it said last month.

A Sony spokesman for the company said this morning: "Although this case is still under investigation, chances that a similar defect to the one with Toshiba will occur at other companies are extremely slim."

The developments have come at a testing time for Sony which earlier this month announced that its PlayStation 3 games console would be delayed in Europe and will now now the crucial Christmas period there.

The PS3 timetable has been pushed back because of problems encountered in manufacturing the next generation Blu-ray DVD system it will carry - which faces a fierce fight with Toshiba's rival HD-DVD format.

A spokeswoman for Toshiba stressed to Reuters that the faulty batteries, used in its Dynabook and Dynabook Satellite laptops, would not catch alight.

She said that the batteries, included in laptops made between March and May this year, had a problem with storing and transmitting power. They would die "only in rare circumstances", she said.

Toshiba would not go into detail about the cost of replacing the batteries, but maintained it would not affect annual earnings this year. It is not clear whether Toshiba will seek financial redress from Sony as a result of the battery problems.

Fujitsu and Hewlett Packard, which also use Sony batteries in their laptops, said no battery problems have been reported in quality control checks.

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