Belkin Laptop Cooling Lounge with adjustable height
Posted by Notcot on Jul 15, 2010 in PCs & Laptops |
Product Description
Belkin Laptop Cooling Lounge with adjustable height F5L028ER Laptops Notebook Accessories
- Powered through your laptop&apost;s USB port – n
- Works with laptops up to 17 inch
- Adjustable height
- Cooling fan keeps the heat from your laptop off
- -
Lounge arrived safe and sound within 36hrs of order. It’s a well-made, sturdy piece of kit, nicely and simply designed so it doesn’t look out of place in your sitting room (i.e. not all officey and tekky).
It’s wider than expected – a 15.4″ laptop has a good inch and a half each side, so it feels and is secure. It’s also very comfortable on your lap – no hard edges to stick in your legs or tummy.
In operation? It worked immediately. Absolutely idiot-proof plug and play. No fiddling with software, settings or buttons.
The biggest plus, of course, is the actual heat reduction. My laptop was cooled tremendously. I monitored changes with a little freeware prog, HW MONITOR (google search). CPU, ACPI, Processor temps all dropped by a whacking 20+degrees C within a few minutes. Hard drive and battery temps dropped at least 10 degrees C. This all appears to have had the effect of speeding up laptop progs. Plus my legs are cool. Fantastic outcomes! (I do a lot of work on my lap – it makes a big, big difference).
The minuses?
1. There is no compensating USB port on the Laptop Lounge to make up for the port it uses on laptop. For a relatively expensive piece of kit, this is plainly inexcuseable. I guess you could disconnect Lounge for as long as you needed to use the USB port though. The design of the Lounge allows a good flow of air around the bottom of the laptop anyway. After disconnecting, my laptop remains cool for 15mins or so then it’s back up to high temps.
2. The cooling fan is much more noisy than I expected. It really does make its presence known. (However, I use earphones a lot to listen online, so it’s not a massive problem…but…
3. The bottom of the cooling fan is easily accessible. Whilst arranging laptop and Lounge I inadvertantly put a finger or two into the aperture whilst fan was running. As a parent I’d worry that this is too accessible for e.g. a small child’s fingers and injury could occur.
4. I have an Acer Gemstone. The earphone and microphone jacks are at the front which means that if you sit the laptop squarely its weight falls on the jack and not against the Lounge retainer bar. There’s enough width to move the laptop along so that it sits against the retainer bar (and the jacks are relieved), but it’s not ideal.
But for these points (especially ‘missing’ USB port), I give the Lounge a 4* rating.
The real problem though is with laptop designers and manufacturers: quite obviously the machines they sell us are badly lacking in cooling. Surely they could use a Belkin fan and incorporate similar design?
Overall, the Laptop Lounge is a good fix and, from my experience so far, worth buying to make up for the mistakes of laptop makers.
Rating: 4 / 5
It’s Brilliant!
When doing heavy duty computing, e.g. Graphics intensive Second Life, or just using the laptop for hours, IT KEEPS IT STONE COLD!!! (I use a quad core processor and separate graphics board).
It’s really comfortable on the lap too, plus no hot legs …
My last laptop died of heat, doing nothing special- my new one won’t.
Oh, I think it looks and feels good too
Yes it has a fan which whirs, but the alternative is a dead laptop. So I like the whir.
PS Just trying Second Life to stretch my laptop – I do have a 1st Life first
Rating: 5 / 5
It works – but it’s noisy and rather clumsy looking and feeling- useful but it dosen’t enhance my IT experience.
Rating: 3 / 5
I bought this recently based on previous Amazon reviews and I’m impressed by how well it cools down my laptop. I can only agree with previous reviewers; it’s really stylish and does the job. However, I have a 17″ laptop and I’ve found that the cooling lounge is pretty unstable when used on a flat surface, even when the cooling lounge isn’t raised. When raised, the lounge and laptop topple backwards, so I’ve found I have to wedge something under the back of the cooling lounge to prevent this. Either the front should have be weighted or small legs should have been added at the back to compensate for this. Also, some of the vents towards the back of the laptop don’t seem to get full benefit from the fan, although the fronter vents have cooled down dramatically. I would imagine that users of smaller laptops won’t have a problem, but, since I bought this specifically because it was suitable for 17″ laptops, the design problems are a bit disappointing. Overall, I still think this is a good product and would recommend it, but I’d just ask users of larger laptops to bear in mind the stability issues when buying.
Rating: 4 / 5
I have a HP Laptop which in the two years of ownership has scarred my legs twice! The poor design of the fan exhausts means that no air circulates because the desk or your lap blocks it. My laptop registered 82deg C one particularly warm day. I guess the average temperature of the base has been around 65deg C. My Belkin Laptop Cooling Lounge arrived today and I immediately plugged it in. Guess what, for the first time ever, the laptop fan has been operating in its slower mode and the base is a cool 15deg C!!! That happened within 5 mins of plugging in.
My laptop has a 17″ screen and it comfortably fits on this cooler. I guess the new 21″ laptops will fit on this easily. The cooler is made of quite hard plastic, which doesn’t look too resilient in terms of shock damage, however, it’s quality plastic with a nice weight and feel to it. The underside has a flexible plastic (polythene) sheet that slides and locks in place forming a “bulge” which acts as a rest for your legs and allows air to circulate freely between the fan inlet and your legs. The “bulge” also acts as a comfortable cushion too. The fan is quite noisy, especially now that the laptop fan is very quiet now (it was louder before the laptop cooler did its work). I was tempted to buy the cheaper products on offer, but I noticed the good reviews that this product had.
Overall, I would say that this is an excellent product and yes, it could have slightly better design features, but it is extremely effective. The fan may be noisy, but it’s quieter than the straining laptop fan before I had this product! I recommend this product with absolutely no hesitations.
Rating: 5 / 5