Sony (NYSE: SNE) just can't get the balance of power right, it seems.

You may recall the hazy days of August 2006, when Sony-made laptop batteries were found to overheat and burn their owners. At the time, Sony made batteries for many other brands and recalls followed from Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), Toshiba, and many others. This was a hardware problem and required that affected users returned their faulty batteries for replacement. That hurts right in the pocketbook, man.

Well, Sony is at it again. The batteries in certain models of the Sony Vaio laptop series may overheat under some circumstances, warping the keyboard and the laptop case in the process. I'd imagine that a meltdown of that magnitude would hurt your lap, too. But two things are different this time: No other computer builder's systems appear to be affected, and Sony has addressed this issue with a software fix. The only thing Sony loses this time is a bit of face, which is something the company has seen a lot of over the years.

If you're reading this on a recent-model Vaio laptop, it may behoove you to download and install the appropriate software fix right about now. But given how far Sony trails behind Dell, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), and Acer in worldwide market share, the chances of that happenstance are slim.

More importantly, this mishap casts a shadow of doubt over the Japanese electronics giant's quality control. What if the company issued a large-scale recall of PlayStation 3 video game boxes? Nintendo and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) would eat it up. At the start of this video-game cycle, Microsoft's initial quality-control issues were cause for a painful $1 billion writedown. And what if the company that invented the Blu-ray standard would find hardware faults in some of its own set-top boxes? There'd be high-fives and keg parties at Panasonic (NYSE: PC), Samsung, and Philips (NYSE: PHG).

As we've seen with Apple's competitors jumping all over it for a design flaw that can cause iPhone signal loss if the phone is held the wrong way, the margin for error in high-end electronics is extremely slim. It's nice to see Sony coming up with a quick and inexpensive fix, but the company had better tread lightly for a while. You don't want to be known as "the company with the crappy quality control," do you?

Have Sony's numerous missteps turned you off the brand already, or are you a diehard devotee? The discussion forum below is open for your flames in either direction.