An HP notebook was left damaged but not destroyed last week when it became the latest laptop to suffer a battery meltdown - the hasty removal of the power cell prevented a notebook fire like the one that took out a Lenovo ThinkPad two weeks ago. This time the incendiary incident was captured on video.

According to witnesses, the notebook began to emit smoke, at which point the clearly asbestos-fingered owner pulled out the smoking power cell and punted it outside into his firm's parking lot. Just in time: the battery caught fire almost immediately.

It's clear from the pictures the battery must have reached temperatures high enough to melt and scorch the laptop's battery bay.

For that reason, we'd never recommend removing an smoking battery. Quite apart from what the heat could do to your hand, here's what happened to the battery after it was removed:

MPEG 4 video file - click to play in new window

You wouldn't want you hands on that...

It's unclear what make of battery was fitted into the HP laptop, and whether it was the original HP-supplied power cell or a third-party add-in. In April this year, HP asked 15,700 customers to return their notebook batteries, which posed a fire risk. ®

Thanks to Reg Hardware reader Rick Fairbourne for the pics

Related stories

• Laptop overheats, vapourises Brazil... almost (11 May 2007)
• Only you can prevent airline battery fires (23 March 2007)
• MacBook goes up in flames (12 March 2007)
• US man badly burned by self-combusting cell phone (16 January 2007)
• Dell accused of selling defective notebooks - again (12 January 2007)
• Sony begins Vaio battery recall (17 October 2006)
• Sharp asks laptop owners to return 28,000 batteries (16 October 2006)
• Hitachi recalls Sony laptop batteries (6 October 2006)
• Fujitsu wants 287,000 Sony batteries back (4 October 2006)
• Lenovo and IBM recall 500k+ batteries (28 September 2006)
• Sony probes Los Angeles Airport laptop blaze (25 September 2006)
• Yahoo! guest's Dell laptop goes up in smoke (21 September 2006)
• Dell laptop detonates in UK home (1 September 2006)
• Japan tells Apple to probe burning battery problem (30 August 2006)
• Dell recalls 4.1m laptop batteries (14 August 2006)
• Two more laptops light up (3 August 2006)
• Dell laptop smoked in Singapore (31 July 2006)
• Dell laptop goes up in smoke (28 July 2006)
• HP recalls 15,700 notebook batteries (20 April 2006)