I opened my laptop for unrelated reasons and was greeted by a slightly bloated battery. Idk if the picture makes it clear, but the individual segments of the battery have slightly raised above the solid structure pieces in between. Laptop is just over a year old. I have already contacted the manufacturer, but with the holidays and everything I'm not sure when I'll get an answer.
Basically, I'm worried about the potential danger. I use my laptop a lot (usually plugged in). Since the battery seems to be screwed in and not glued, I could just take it out, but idk if that would be better than just leaving it in until the manufacturer sends me a new one or has me send it in for battery replacement.
Also, I hope that consumer hardware posts like this are accepted in this community. The rules at least don't state otherwise.
Edit: thank you all for your comments. I brought the bloated battery to a recycling center the day after I made this post. Communication with Medion support eventually led to me talking to a very pleasant service technician on the phone. He sent me a new battery, which I just installed. Everything is working great again.
Warning : I've used to fix apple computers back in the day when there were still things to fix, and if this had happened to an Apple device and it had less than 50 cycles on it and was over 6 months from purchase (meaning it went less then 50x under 50% of your full battery capacity), they would refuse to replace it saying it is user's fault. Nbooks with NiMh batteries could stay connected to power forever, notebooks with Li-ion batteries need to "excercise them".
It still ran a lot on battery alone, usually in school. But I'll keep that in mind for the future.