"It hasn't had too much of an impact on us," said Tim Ryan, network manager at City College of San Francisco, which had about 30 batteries replaced out of about 300 Toshiba and Apple laptops used by faculty and staff. Users were given information about the recalls and asked to bring in their laptops for the battery swap. However, Ryan said his college "doesn't tally things like our time to replace things that closely."

"In the scale of things that can go wrong like a virus or worm, this was relatively minor," he said.

Still, the stories about laptops exploding or catching fire got his attention, as well as the attention of his IT colleagues -- one of whom attended a seminar in Tokyo last summer at which a laptop burst into flames. The fire was traced to a poor battery. "He shared his story, and that got everybody's attention," Ryan said.

Schon Crouse, a mobility integration analyst at Children's Hospital at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, said that laptop batteries are being replaced in about 20 of 150 Dell machines used by the hospital. For Children's "it's been a little bit of a problem, because the user has had no battery for a while during the replacement," Crouse said.

As soon as Children's officials learned the batteries could lead to explosions, they asked users to take any affected batteries out of the laptops and use AC power instead. "It means they have to stay plugged into the wall until they get a new battery -- and one user was going out of town, so we had to scramble to find him a good battery," Crouse said.