The Belkin Laptop Cooling Pad has made my sluggish computer perform better than new, and for the $20 – $25 price, it is one of the best investments I’ve made toward my laptop since the day I purchased my laptop. The Belkin Laptop cooling pad is a single fanned pad with a design that holds my laptop at a slight incline which is nice for comfortable use of the keyboard, and a curved instead of flat surface that channels the cool air across the entire bottom of my laptop.
My Acer laptop is equipped with a dual core AMD CPU, and if you know your computers, you know that AMD processors run a bit hotter than Intel processors. Because of this AMD CPU’s will fry if they get too hot from a lack of cleaning the vents and cooling fans. Because of this, technological advances have incorporated miniature heat sensors under the CPU on the motherboard that continually monitors the CPU’s heat. When the CPU begins to get too hot, it slows down the clock cycle, which equates to slowing down your computer, and if the temperature of the CPU continues to rise it will immediately turn off your computer, and I don’t mean it shuts down windows, I mean your computer will simply shut off immediately including your monitor.
I crunch a lot of home movies and other video stuff, converting Mpeg2 format to Divx. Lately my computer has been slowing down and my crunching speed has dropped from 40 to 60 frames per second down to around 14 frames per second. Then one day it happened… I was copying some home movies and my computer just quit like someone pulled the battery pack off. I knew this mean I needed to take panels off the bottom and clean everything out real well, I clean my vent ports regularly, but I also knew that my laptop gets quite warm sometimes when I am doing a lot of work, so I decided to invest $25 for the Belkin Laptop Cooling Pad just to see if that would resurrect my aging laptop. What a surprise I was in for. While I still need to remove the panels and clean it properly, sticking my laptop on this pad not only brought my laptop back to life, it now runs faster than it ever has, crunching mepg to Divx at speeds up to 80 frames per second. In layman’s terms this means a 1 hour video will compress in less than 30 minutes.
The Belkin Laptop Cooling Pad also boasts on their package that it was rated number one by Cnet in 2007, and I can see why. My lap no longer gets hot when using it, and you can feel the cool air coming out from both sides of the laptop. Operation of the fan comes by way of a USB cable that plugs into one of your USB ports.
The only weak point to comment on that I can find with the Belkin Laptop Cooling pad is the fold out stand on the back does not lock into place real securely, and if you try to slide the unit back on a counter, it will fold under. I remedied this easy enough with a piece of tape as a temporary test, but it could also be glued into place with some good model cement.
The bottom line is, I wish I had purchased the Belkin Laptop Cooling Pad almost two years ago when I got my computer, maybe my wifes computer would still be working today. If you are using a Laptop, I highly recommend you purchase some type of cooling pad, one with fans is better than the open web type, and Belkins single fan is more than enough without using up your batteries to run multiple fans.
