Laptop ice pack

several related issues -

My knee hurts (ow). Some combination of several days straight of 18000+ step days, berry and pea picking on my knees, the usual kid wrangling and what I think is an old injury conspired to make my left knee unhappy. I did the minimal pedestrian thing today (and still had 7000 steps) and found an ice pack to keep the knee cool.

Coincidentally I noticed that my laptop was running hot, and so made the ice pack do double duty as a laptop cooling device.

Wow, what a difference!

This is what iStat Nano reports (degrees Farenheit). I don't have a before number, but I know that the "enclosure bottom" is usually way higher and hot to the touch.

The icepack I have is a Ace Hot And Cold Compress of uncertain vintage. It's flexible with a cloth cover so there's no risk of condensation on the bottom. I've linked a few likely candidates from Amazon if you want to experiment.

Ace Reusable Cold Compress, 11.75" x 8.25"

Technorati Tags: laptop, knee, cool, annarbor

Comments

[Edward Vielmetti]

here's a clip from Wired Magazine with someone with the same idea:

http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/2006/06/icepack_speeds_.html

It reads more clearly in German, I promise. His point is simple, though -- hot computers suck, and getting "disgustingly sticky in handling in photoshop" is only the beginning.

With the help of the ice pack on the bottom of the PowerBook, though, the prozessor's underseit temperatur, er, I mean, the processor's underside temperature drops precipitously, and Photoshop gets unstickied. Remember, only use sealed artificial ice packs -- I imagine ice cubes wouldn't be a sustainable solution.