Chilled laptops

My laptop went belly up during the height of the summer, and following a replacement of the overheated hard-drive I was up and running again. However now it's a case of once bitten twice shy. If I'm going to leave my PC on during the day, which is necessary from time to time, I don't want a repeat of the overheating and a bill for replacement components (a hard drive in my case.)

Following some research on-line, it seems that I am by no means the first person to encounter overheating problems with their laptop. In fact, it's very much a trait with powerful portable PCs. As a result, there are a few different solutions on the market designed to keeping the underside of the laptop at temperatures below which it could happily fry an egg.

In general these laptop coolers consist of fans built into a metal base, which, while providing a cool resting place for the laptop to begin with also blows air onto the underside of the laptop (typically where fan grills and vital components reside) keeping everything within acceptable tempatures. I opted for the laptop cooler by Akasa, which cost about £25 including delivery from Watford Electronics (savastore.com).

It did pretty much what it said on the tin. The fan is very quiet, and the laptop feels a lot, lot cooler than normal, even during long periods of intensive use. I don't have software installed yet to measure the temperature difference, but I might also give this a try in due course for some more scientific results. Furthmore the base is also angled in its design, which is supposed to angle the keyboard more naturally for typing.

The only disadvantage I found is that the USB cable provided has built in blue LEDs. Although this is handy to tell that the base is being powered, it is rather distracting. It does seem to be something of a feature in Akasa products, as their hard drive case I use also heavily features the same blue lights, both along the side of the unit and in the sockets of the USB cable. Funky to begin with, but perhaps a bit OTT.

Nevertheless, I feel much more at ease having the cooler in place, safe in the knowledge that my laptop is unlikely to get too hot under the cover and blow a gasket. I'd recommend this, or similar cooler products to laptop users, as its said the additional cooling extends the PC's life, improves performance, and you've for the benefit of a more egonomically agreed typing position to boot.