RALEIGH, NC — It has not been a good year for laptop batteries, what with last year’s exploding Dell notebooks resulting in massive recalls and bad press for the company, as well as battery manufacturer Sony. Now a recent shipment of the popular Lenova ThinkPad has proven to suffer from the same tragic flaw in its Sanyo manufactured batteries.205,000 is the number of “extended” ThinkPad batteries that have been voluntarily recalled by Lenova due to several reports that they have a nasty tendency to overheat and then become dangerous when dropped a specific way. The company is offering free replacements of the extended-life nine-cell batteries.

A press release issued by Lenova late last week stated that “Lenova has confirmed that notebook computers containing the recalled battery packs may overheat, posing a potential safety hazard to users if the battery pack experiences a strong external impact.”

Five customers had previously reported that their laptops had done precisely that after falls from what Lenova calls a “certain height and a certain angle,” and which the company was able to replicate in its labs. A UK representative for Lenova who spoke to ZDNet UK says that the company decided to immediately recall the batteries.

The affected batteries were sold as option or replacement packs for, as well as part of, the R60, R60e, T60, and T60p Series, as well as the Z60m, Z61e, Z61m, and Z61p Series.