Laptop Coolers

Today, more and more people are ditching their desktops and turning towards laptops or netbooks. Have no doubt, today’s laptops rival and are equal in power and functionality to the traditional desktop. Which brings us to another problem. Laptops (and netbooks) get hot. Very hot. As these machines become more and more powerful, so does the amount of heat they generate. Despite using all the space age material, etc. some of these darn things can get so hot, you simply cannot touch the underside of it (or even the topside).

Placing such a hot laptop on your lap, is out of the question. Also, unknown to many people, long exposure to heat of 35-40 degrees (Celsius) on the skin can lead to burns.

If your processor uses near full power (for example if you’re running a powerful calculation that is eating up 100% processing power) and your disk, etc. is all working, the laptop/netbook can heat up very quickly. If the ambient temperature around your laptop is high (35 degrees or higher), then this will actually aid in the over-heating of your laptop.

Elongated periods of the laptop being too hot, is a recipe for disaster. You are inviting some parts of the laptop to fail.

This very problem has spawned a completely new industry, that of Laptop Coolers. Laptop coolers come in two forms:

1. powered and
2. non-powered

The Powered variety relies on small USB fans inside the Laptop Coolers to run off the power of your USB port and cool the laptop down. They essentially have two variations (of how they work). One variation blows surrounding cool air (relatively speaking) on to the laptop’s undercarriage to help in cooling in. The other variation (very hard to see these days), throws air as well as extracts hot air away from the laptop. Some (and I stress some, not all) laptop coolers come with external power supplies to power them up, otherwise they pretty much ask you to give up one of your USB ports so they can be powered up.

When a laptop cooler is attached to the laptop, it will have a noticeable impact on the faster draining of the battery (assuming for some odd reason you’re only using the battery and not the mains).  Some of them can also get a bit noisy. But you can bet your bottom dollar, your laptop will be a whole lot cooler than before.

The non-powered type of laptop coolers have no moving parts or fans. Instead they are designed with near space age material (like very heat conductive types of alloys such as aluminium alloys) and make use of physics to determine how heat can be best extracted from the laptop and how it can be dissipated into the air, by the virtue of the design of the laptop cooler.

Personally, my mind says if there is a fan running, it is getting cooled, but then, that’s just me. Today, 100s of makers are in the market, selling different types and kinds of laptop coolers, and they are gaining popularity fast, especially for those who use their laptops at home and in the office on the desk. Because of the very little space between the laptop’s bottom (undercarriage) and the desk, air flow isn’t optimal, and to make use of a laptop cooler makes sense for both the machine and the mind.

Images: Borrowed from Gizmodo