Laptop Notebook Cool Pad w/ 3 Fans
by Generic
List Price:
Our Price: $2.29
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Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Category: CE
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Photo Product Details
Manufacturer: GenericModel: CPA-1627
Product features:
- Extends the life of your notebook
- Designed with the clear plastic construction
- Can give out charming blue LED light while running
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Laptop Notebook Cool Pad w/ 3 Fans
Customer Review: Can't even tell if it's doing anything useful.. blue lights are annoying!..
Summary: 3 Stars
My two and a half year-old Acer 5520 laptop (Vista Home Premium SP1, four gb of RAM, the usual bells and whistles).. developed some weirdness a few weeks ago.. after running Malware and Virus checks on it, I determined it was an over-heating problem causing the computer to either suddenly, without warning, display a screen of diagonal, fuzzy black and white bars (requiring a power-off and re-start), or it would spontaneously shut itself off.. I have a freeware program called "CoreTemp" which I've had on the machine for a year.. I don't run it all the time, but it used to show the laptop's AMD dual-core CPU running in the 150 f temperature range.. when it started mis-behaving, it was running 20 - 30 degrees hotter, often peaking at 200 f..
Processes that took a couple of hours, such as a full Norton Anti-Virus scan of over 200,000 files, or a full C: drive back-up to my 1 tb external Seagate drive put a very heavy load on the CPU and hard drive, and the machine would often just spontaneously power off when I ran such routines..
I use this laptop as a desktop replacement.. it's on 24 hours a day.. Acer once told me that if one keeps a laptop on 24 hours a day, it should be run with the battery out.. I never did that, but thinking that perhaps the constant charging of the battery could be causing over-heating, I took the battery out, and left it out for two days.. no change, and when in, the battery's not even warm.. it takes and holds a full charge, so that wasn't it..
Unlike other mfrs., Acer doesn't put their service manuals online for downloading, so I had NO idea how many fans the laptop has in it, or if they use heatsinks on the CPU and GPU (NVideo G-Force 7000M graphics chip).. and since the laptop is 18 months out-of-warranty, and I'm cash-strapped, there's no way I was going to try to open it up to see what was going on, or take it to a local computer store and pay them two or three hundred bucks to repair it..
I checked all the air intake and fan output vents, blasted them with Dust-off, none of them were blocked with dust anyway, so I decided to "invest" in one of these cheap cooling pads, after reading every review of it, plus reviews of other, similar cheap units..
When I ordered it from Amazon.com, the price was [...] plus about seven bucks shipping from NY.. the price on this thing seems to fluctuate every day.. yesterday it was [...]!.. today it's [...].. go figure..
I ordered it, and it was shipped from NY in a box, in a huge padded mailer by USPS First Class Parcel Mail, and arrived in three days.. after unpacking it, before moving a lot of stuff around to put it under the laptop, I plugged it into an open USB port.. two of the three fans came on.. the middle fan didn't.. I spun the fan with a finger and it started working, but that center fan made a horrible buzzing sound.. so I unplugged it..
Examining it closely, and slowly spinning the center fan's blades with my finger, I saw that one of the two tiny blue LEDs was actually TOUCHING the blades of the center fan, so I carefully bent the LED back a little.. that solved that problem..
I plugged it back in to a USB port, and all three fans spun in virtual silence.. made in China, one could AT THE VERY LEAST expect someone at the factory to actually plug these things into a USB port on a computer, just to make sure all three fans spin and none of the LEDs, which are VERY close to the blades, are touching the blades.. apparently, the factory doesn't test these things AT ALL before boxing and shipping them off..
I put the unit under my laptop, arranged things back the way they were, and it's been under there for two days, with all three fans spinning 24 hours a day..
Comments..
- each fan has two intensely bright blue LEDs on either side of it.. these LEDS serve absolutely NO purpose at all - they're just unnecessary bling.. perhaps, they impress teenagers or kids in college dorms.. I'm neither..
- With the laptop on top of the fan pad, there's some blue light shining out both sides and the back (behind the open screen) and a bit of light out the front.. still, it's totally annoying - the LEDs serve absolutely NO purpose, so I might just take a black Sharpie and color the LEDs black. which won't hurt them at all..
- the body of the unit is very thin, clear plastic, and ALL the wires are housed in extremely thin, transparent tubing and totally exposed below the unit.. as long as you're not going to move the thing around much, or at all, that doesn't really make any difference, but it's hardly built like a tank.. a ten year-old could grip this pad on both sides with two hands and easily snap it in half.. its four rubber feet raise it off the surface of your desk or table half an inch, and raise the laptop's base up away from the pad half an inch.. the two rear legs are a bit taller than the two front legs, so it gives the laptop a couple degrees of forward tilt.. why?.. No idea..
- The fans pull hot air AWAY from the computer; they don't blow air AT it.. so the idea is that this thing should theoretically lower the temperature of an over-heating laptop by pulling and venting hot air away from its bottom side, and exhaust it out all four sides.. it seems to do that, but the CoreTemp program doesn't indicate it's doing much of anything.. the laptop is running maybe five or ten degrees cooler AT BEST.. sometimes..
My conclusion is that this is a very cheaply-made unit that isn't even plugged in at the factory and tested, before it's boxed.. it runs in almost total silence.. the blue LEDs are extremely annoying to me, and serve no purpose whatsoever.. like I said, they're just bling and nothing more - painting flames in the sides of your car isn't going to up its horsepower, if you catch my drift.. if you like annoying blue light shining out from under your laptop, then you'll love this thing.. if not, not..
I don't want to hex this laptop by saying whether it's crashed or powered itself off since I put this fan pad underneath it.. the three fans work (after I fixed one of the LEDs as explained above).. I can feel warm air blowing VERY gently out all four sides under the laptop, AND warm air IS blowing out of the laptop's own rear vent slots, as it always has.. so its MAIN internal fan SEEMS to be working.. if it has additional fans inside, I don't know.. if it does and one of them failed, I don't know, since I can't find Acer's service manual for this model laptop anywhere..
This purchase was a last-ditch effort on my part to see if SOME kind of cheap, external product would cool the laptop and stop the spontaneous crashes and shut-downs.. for a total of about eight bucks, it SEEMS to be doing something, but not much.. TANSTAAFL..
If the laptop continues to spontaneously power itself off, or go into diagonal fuzzy line mode requiring a manual power-off and re-start, I'll just have to raise the cash to buy a new one.. this Acer 5520 was [...] brand new in the box in January, 2008.. it's not worth the cost to have it repaired, and a new 15.4" laptop with better specs can be had for about $400.00 these days..
Description of Laptop Notebook Cool Pad w/ 3 Fans
Keep your notebook Cool, with this USB2.0 3 FAN Powered Slim smart Laptop Notebook Cooler Pad Cooling Cooler Pad w/Blue LED. It helps improve the performance of your notebook, and prevents any untold damage to your hardware.Digital Cameras & Photo Categories
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