Related Articles

Introduction

The 3DCOOL Laptop Cooler is 3DCOOL's name for the JustCooler NB-100 PCMCIA cooling card. This quaint little device purports to cool down your laptop by ingeniously slipping into a free PCMCIA slot, and drawing air through an external fan and shunting it into the portion of the cooler which is exposed to the interior of the system.

Now some may question the need for a laptop cooler, since it is nigh impossible to overclock the mobile CPU, and there really aren't any expansion cards to install that might add extra heat to the laptop. The fact of the matter is that laptops run HOT. There are several reasons for this: the CPU and mainboard components, the confined space of the laptop's components, the compact hard drive, and the batteries. Each of these factors affect both the external and internal heat of the portable computer, which results in three things: discomfort for the user (because his lap is being seared by the heated base of the unit, or because the wrist rest area is heating up and getting at the hands), possible instability of the system leading to lockups or crashes, and increased potential for failure of the hard drive.