For a portable stand to raise your laptop to eye level from the desk, check out the Roost stand http://www.therooststand.com/ , you do need a keyboard and mouse to use with it, I use a Happy Hacking keyboard and a mouse with it, and it gives me are good ergonomic experience almost anywhere. I got mine in their kickstarter.
Why do people buy laptops that need aftermarket accessories to perform a basic function like cooling? If they buy one by mistake, why don’t they return it?
Seriously, this is weird to me. No snark in any way intended, all boojum here.
If I was going to buy a car, right away I’d rule out any cars that I knew required me to bolt on additional radiators. And if I accidentally bought one that overheated during use, I’d return it under my state’s “lemon law” or under the consumer protection laws that require a product to be suited for the purposes for which it is sold.
It’s not that the laptop overheats, it’s that keeping air moving beneath it will extend its life. You could build laptops that cool better, but they would probably be bigger and heavier. The current design is a compromise, like most things in life.
I’ve used a baker’s wire rack under my laptop for years, the kind you use to cool cakes and cookies. ~$5. Flat, it works great. If I tilt up my laptop for comfort, I put a couple of binder clips on the front of the frame and with the ears sticking up to keep the laptop from sliding off.
I bought a very similar iteration if not exactly the same item in UKs Poundland for exactly 1 quid back in 2009 approximately.
If it dies young because it’s insufficiently cooled and slowly cooks itself, how is that not overheating? 
In any product other than a laptop, wouldn’t that be called overheating? That’s what I’d call it.
But I get your point that you can’t return it, if it doesn’t cook itself until long after the warranty runs out.
My unremarkable mass-market laptop weighs 3 pounds, is about seven years old, and never overheats. I can’t run any modern closed-source OSes on it, because it’s about seven years old, but it does fine with linux.
One potentially reasonable answer is that, for many laptop users, small size/weight is a legitimately more useful feature than the ability to redline the processor frequently. Broad cooling ducts and powerful fans make make the case bigger. If you buy, say, a MacBook Air, you’re intentionally trading power for convenience, and that’s okay.
I think my question would instead be “what are you doing with your laptop that regularly causes heating problems.” My MBP is more than three years old now, and the only time it troubles me heat-wise is when it’s in my lap and making my legs sweat–and this gizmo explicitly doesn’t work in laps, so I’m not really clear on what the point is.
A related question is why the people do not ask for designs that would not rely on airflow not being impeded by something below or on the side of the laptop. Which is oh so common when using the laptop in bed, or on a lap with a blanket over legs.
I ran into that problem with my earlier laptop, and had to come up with a solution. Which involved additional hole with a wire mesh on the top of the laptop body (as the fan draws air to its center, so the side does not matter, and the top side always has unimpeded airflow when the lid is opened, and some airflow guards on the egress ports that open to top, bottom, and side.
The result was not less than stellar. I wonder why this is not a design norm.
http://shaddack.twibright.com/projects/mod_LaptopThinkpadR60cooling/
Hello,
I have used the Targus X-stand and it did work okay for me to elevate the laptop to a more comfortable typing angle, however, I found that the two plastic nodes (unsure of the correct term) that the laptop would rest against when facing the user would end up pressing into my arms, and that became uncomfortable enough over time that I stopped using the stand.
Hey, thanks for posting all your projects online. I wish I was industrious enough to do that, since I get a lot of good ideas and useful information (and enjoyment) from looking at other people’s hacking. But I am terrible at photography as well as very lazy.
Doesn’t everyone own a dedicated notebook-in-bed cutting board?
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