3D COOL Laptop Cooler Review - PAGE 3

The first thing that strikes you when receiving the cooler is that it is amazingly well thought out. The device draws power directly through the PCMCIA port, and works easily with Plug and Play simplicity in Windows 9X. On older systems, a utility driver is available to activate or deactivate the fan as desired. The small fan is seated in a compact casing with a plastic fan grille and modest filter. The filter is quite porous, and looks to be good only against larger dust particles.

Those of you who have had laptops way in the past, before IBM came out with its pencil erasor style pointers, and before touchpads caught on, will remember the old trackball style mice that clipped onto the side of the laptop. Well the Laptop Cooler is similar in size, though it is less obtrusive. The 3500RPM fan moves around 8CFM of air, and has a noise level rated at 21db. In actual use, it is relatively quiet, but you definitely notice that it's there from the constant hum. The hum doesn't bother me at all, and though the external housing of the cooler vibrated to the touch, this didn't transfer at all to the laptop. The design of the fan doesn't allow for the exit of air, but because notebooks by nature have ventilation grilles and plenty of gaps for air to escape, the air simply flows right out - and it's a noticeable increase of airflow compared to the laptop's own, modest fan.

Some Practicality Considerations

The Laptop Cooler is installed in the upper most PCMCIA slot - the slits in the card portion of the Cooler are angled upwards, and so installation on the lower slot could potentially block the slits and negate the effects of the cooler. Installing the Laptop Cooler on the top slot may prove to be a problem for users who have a definite need to access the lower PCMCIA slot: the cooler is large enough to be an obstacle in many cases. For example, some PCMCIA modems and LAN cards that use the 3Com XJack or similar jack systems would be completely obstructed. With current day laptops, many of which include integrated modems and/or ethernet connectors, this would not be an issue, but consumers should make certain that they will not ever need direct access to connections on a PCMCIA device in the slot below the Cooler. We have a relatively new laptop, with an integrated modem, but without any ethernet capabilities. Thankfully, our Linksys COMBO Ethernet PCMCIA card comes with a dongle on which are found both the RJ-45 and coaxial Ethernet connectors - the dongle's super slim connector allowed us to easily use both the ethernet card and the Cooler without any problems whatsoever. Most network manufacturers have an ethernet product with dongle, and though the dongle is oft seen as a curse and nuissance, in this case it is a blessing :).