Internal Debate: Heated Questions

As you may or may not know, I recently had a difficult experience with my Alienware notebook PC. It was a monstrous contraption, advertised as a desktop replacement with all the gaming power a kid could ever ask for. At first, when I bought it, I was in heaven. I didn’t stay in heaven very long.

To make an extraordinarily long story short: my computer stopped playing games about two months out of warranty; I owned a machine that had to be raised up on stilts and cooled with an industrial fan just to work as advertised; I discovered I was not, by a long shot, the only one with this particular issue; and I realized that I was an idiot for not having purchased a warranty that lasted more than a year (though much good it would have done me, I later found out).

A question has been lingering on my mind ever since that Alienware experience: Just how hard could it be to design a notebook with adequate cooling?

The all-too-obvious answer to that question has got to be “pretty darned hard,” considering no company has yet boasted about solving it and notebooks continue getting hotter and hotter. Nevertheless, in a notebook that’s over two inches thick, why can’t you shove a miniaturized water-cooling system in there? How about a tiny tank of Freon to condition some of that airflow? Obviously there’d be a few hurdles—likely, pretty big ones—but so far the best solution we’ve come up with is to blow on it a little bit. When I burnt my fingers on the iron as a little kid (well, okay, as a big kid, too), I’d blow on them, and you know what? It didn’t do a darned thing. My mom, in her infinite wisdom, immediately took my hand and ran it under cool water. It worked every time. Shouldn’t OEMs take the hint?

Yes, some systems wouldn’t be able to fit it in. Yes, some systems wouldn’t even need it—I work off of an always-cool Lenovo T42 here at CW, and it does its job just fine. But I’d never play F.E.A.R. or Quake 4 on the little tyke; for that, one must pull out the big guns. Unfortunately, those big guns need some serious polishing; right now, at least one gaming machine I know of doesn’t play games at all.