I've just purchased one of these handy little laptop cooling plinths from Amazon for the best part of £30, (which ain't bad) so that I'm no longer able to fry eggs on the underside of my lappie chassis.I've only been running with it for about 2 hours or so, but I'm already quite impressed. the underside of my laptop is now "touch safe" and fingers don't get welded to any exposed metal surface. Also, given that the cooler has a forward-tilted design, it actually leads to a much more comfortable typing position. (I normally just have my laptop laid flat on a table).
Most modern laptops that have any serious GPU, CPU components built-in suffer from some bad intermittment performance characteristics due to thermal effects, but since applying the cooler (I'm not sure if I'm just imagining this) but my performance appears to have been much more stable - even whilst running multiple VMWare images in parallel. I'll post again on this in a couple of weeks once I've had chance to monitor the core temperatures for a longer period of time.
Installation was as easy as it could be - just plonk your laptop on top of the cooler, connect the cooler to a spare USB port (it drains power from the USB bus so no need for a separate power supply) and away you go. It also has a built in 4-port USB hub which is handy - prevents getting the usual rats nest of USB cables if you've attached multiple devices in this way. (I have mouse and two external HDD's). The sound levels are very quiet as well - quieter than the standard Dell built in fan (I have a fully-loaded D830 running Ubuntu Hardy Heron), which incidentally hasn't been running at all since the cooler was switched on.
I'll see what it's like for reliability over the next couple of weeks, but so far - as I say, I'm impressed.
Nice gadget.
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