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Heat Insulators for Laptops
Alex Bischoff writes "The Gadgeteer has a review of a product called LapPads from LapLogic. They're heat-insulating pads to protect you from cooking your lap when using your laptop. Depending on the model, they apparently provide up to 57 degrees (F) reduction in heat transfer. Why didn't someone think of this sooner?"
So instead of heating up your leg, it will just heat up the inside of the machine.
Jon Bardin
Because it'll cook your laptop.
Just make the pad the bottom of the laptop.. I remember the good old days when laptops meant LAPtops..
Now it's "desktop replacements"... like putting a desk on your lap?
Most laptop instruction books I've read (not too many though), say the laptop should be used on a flat surface that does not block the ventalition.
An insulator may just help the laptop fry itself more, a piece of laptop sized wood is probably more helpful, though not "cool" to be seen with.
mailto:EatSpamAndDie@princeweb.com
Remember the old IBM Thinkpad 760 series? They had a silicon pad on the bottom of it (wasn't on the original models, added sometime in their production run) to keep you from burning yourself. It was their "fix" for a computer that had no fan, and got way too hot. And those were only P120-P166 models.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
57 degrees reduction in surface temperature doesn't just depend on the pad, it assumes a a laptop with certain thermal characteristics and surface area and power use. It could be any laptop, since they don't tell you which, so they might as well be pulling the number out of their ass. The thermal resistivity of a planar surface should just be quoted in watts per degree celcius per square centimeter, ok? This is ridiculous. It reminds me of the History channel talking about "pounds of energy" in a wave. Get the units straight or you might as well be pulling a number out of your ass.
This isn't really necessary. All you're trying to do is reduce the heat transfer between the laptop and your thighs; what this does is insulate the system. The primary mode of heat transfer in this situation is conduction, so what we need is a way to eliminate that and still maintain a semblance of cooling.
This system eliminates conduction by insulation, which also removes convection. A better model would establish a standoff distance between the thighs and the surface of the laptop. This removes conduction, and still allows convection to cool the surface of the laptop. Something like a honeycomb would do this.
Rangefinders for cars? Durr, what about oncoming traffic--it'd make your car flip out! Robotic vaccuum cleaner? Hah hah, what about my stairs? Hard-drive based music player? What if you drop it? Wouldn't it a-splode? Drinking straw? What if you accidentally put it up your nose instead of in your mouth? Huh? What then? Chaos!
Reading the FA aside, does it ever occur to people that a company in the business of making heat-dissipating pads specifically designed to work with laptops just might take the internal temperature of the laptop into consideration? Do people really think that products are designed by an army of Mr. Magoo clones?
Yeah, design mistakes happen, but seriously--if you're able to think of a potential problem after ten seconds' worth of thought, do you really think it likely that the design team wouldn't have considered the exact same thing?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Whether or not that was the best design for dissipating heat is a separate discussion for another day. The fact remains that the laptop *is* dissipating heat this way, and the designers of the pad *know* it, and they are knowingly circumventing it.
The website states:
"LapLogic specializes in Laptop Desks & LapPads that provide up to 57F protection from laptop heat without increasing CPU temperatures. In fact, with our Traveler LapPads,
your CPU will actually run cooler! "
If the heat is "bounced back" into the laptop, how is the CPU running cooler?
if the heat goes back into your laptop, then your laptop will get hotter, and will kick the bucket sooner... basic laws of reliability. delta T = bad
"Mr. President, we cannot allow a mineshaft gap!"
That's why Dell doesn't sell "laptops" any more, they sell "notebooks".
If it was going to take five minutes instead of four, you'd probably want a 25% (or more) increase in battery life - 20% would die before you were done.
Give life
Instead of crowing about how cool it is that someone decided to market a heat insulator for all of the "Hot Laptop bottoms", why don't we put our efforts and commentary into how to make them cooler... I am a Mac user my self and have noticed how the PB that I have gets uncomfortably hot after several hours of use. I also Have a Dell Inspiron that gets hotter yet... Yes the heat insulator works but it seems a band-aid to the real problem which is the engineering behind getting rid of excess heat. It seems that most developers of portables have no problem dissapating heat by allowing it to exit via baseplates in the laptops... ie your lap gets boiled. So really the end result is that we humans are the recipients of the excess waste heat and we are the actual end dissapators.... So the engineers in their final analysis must conclude that human flesh will be able to absorb the residual waste heat that is generated and have no problem letting the heat dissapate this way. I want a laptop that is able to be handled for its expected battery-life without being subject to a very hot plastic or metal surface. Just my 2cents
I bet the people that complain the most are probably the ones that have "desknotes".
A straight Pentium 4 (or K8 for that matter) with no dynamic clock throttling simply isn't meant for mobile use. I think mobile chips are also fabbed using different processes to drain less current, and use some fancy tweaks as well.
Not that they have battery power worth shit anyways, they often barely last an hour, forget three or four.