Cooling your laptop, jet engine style

Intel unveiled a new cooling technology last week that may have future laptops sitting comfortably on our laps. Designed with ultra-thin laptops in mind, the technology is based on the concept of laminar flow, which is also used to cool jet engines. Laminar flow occurs when a fluid or gas flows smoothly in parallel layers across a surface. In Intel's instance, air is used to keep not just the inside, but the outside of a laptop a moderate temperature.

Overheating laptops cause more problems than most people realized. Heat issues often result in reboots and crashes, and tend to be misdiagnosed as software or malware problems. Overheating can only be made worse with ultra-thin laptops, such as the Apple MacBook Air and the Lenovo ThinkPad X300.

I teach several classes throughout the week and I have a student who brings her laptop with her to class--decked out with a clunky cooling base. The student says that without the cooling base, her laptop will overheat and shutdown within a short period of time. When that happens, the laptop will remain unusable until it has cooled off adequately. Crazy isn't it?

Unfortunately, similar to the huge blind spot in the ‘real world' performance of battery life, there isn't any proper way to evaluate the internal temperatures of laptops; well, other than the "put on the lap" test, I suppose. - Paul