Finding a laptop (and lap) cooler

**Update: Carol, my girlfriend, told me yesterday, that she's not exactly happy with the Kingwin cooler. This is because they also didn't entirely design for it to be used on top of a lap and so the bottom isn't flat and has little rubber feet.

I'd suggest that if someone is looking to design one of these products that they allow the end user to choose whether to stick on feet or not. /End Update**

These days just about everything in a computer runs hot. From the CPU, to the hard drive to the graphics processor, things are just getting hotter. This is exacerbated in a laptop where everything is crammed into as tight a space as possible, leaving little room for fans and/or channels for air flow.

My girlfriend's laptop is no exception. It's a fairly decent laptop from Gateway (although I don't like the "glass" like LCD screen as it picks up glare a lot more than a regular matte LCD screen), but it does get hot.

This is particularly a problem because she mostly uses it on her lap. I know, novel idea for a laptop, eh? A lot of the companies that make "laptop" coolers apparently don't seem to think that people use them on their laps.

Which brings us to the problem and the point of the post. On hot days, or after long periods of use, it really gets uncomfortable to use on her laptop, plus the temperatures inside the notebook can't be doing much good for the internals.

So we started looking for a solution. And while there are plenty of so-called "laptop coolers", there aren't many that can be used while on a lap.

Most are like these products from Antec, Vantec, or this one from Bytecc. These coolers are obviously designed primarily for use on a desktop or other flat surface. In fact the BYTECC cooler looks like it would be very uncomfortable to even attempt to use on your lap. The others aren't much better as the fans vent downwards, right where your lap is, so airflow will be greatly restricted.

Even some of the reviews (here's an example) gloss over using coolers for this purpose and only look at functionality while using the laptop on a flat surface.

We did find one solution that doesn't have these problems. This cooler from Kingwin. It works on the lap because it vents the air in from the sides. It's not perfect, however, as it requires a separate transformer for power, vs most of the other coolers that get power from one of the notebook's USB ports. It was also $7-10 more than the other products.

One more problem with this and all the other coolers, I've seen. The vents on the Gateway laptop are all on the sides and back. So any of the coolers will provide only very modest cooling to the laptop. Putting space between the system and your lap, does fix the problem of your legs getting overheated though.

When I was looking at the websites for links for this piece, I did see that Vantec came out with a cooler that vents out the back, so it should work decently on your lap as well.

However, what we really need, at least for laptops where there are no vents on the bottom, are solutions that push cold air into the intake vents on the sides and/or back of the laptop.

By the way, we did end up going with the Kingwin cooler, as it was the only one that seemed like it would work at all while on a lap.

If you know of any other products out there that fit the bill for cooling a laptop while on a lap, let me know. Basically, the way I see it, the requirements for this are that the cooler insulate the lap from the system, provide active cooling as well in an integrated package.

As a side note, I also want to point out how well the Kingwin site shows you the product. They give you pictures that just about show the cooler from all angles, which really lets you know how it might work for you. The other sites are all very sparse in pictures and details. So kudos to Kingwin for that as well.