I noticed this was a "best seller" on Amazon and just got it. $18. Basically its a small platform which elevates the laptop above the surface and rests on a thin metal grate which works great as a heat sink. Underneath the grate is a low speed fan which blows air up towards the laptop and keeps the air circulating underneath. It is not noiseless, however, the noise of the fan is very tolerable and less than that of the laptop itself. Its powered by your usb port. My laptop constantly runs over 100 degrees and can get way up there to 150 degrees at times, but with this pad I am running 85-95 degrees. The description says its "slim" but its not uber slim. I would say its a little thicker than most laptops, however, it can fit easily in most laptop bags along with the laptop. http://www.amazon.com/Cooler-Master...id=1363104473&sr=8-1&keywords=slim+cooler+pad
I guess it can be useful if you had the laptop for home... I travel with mine and when at home it is on its docking station... T420s.... not much issues with heat... taking another "device" along to cool it is just adding weight to my bag that I dont want to carry...
I place the laptop on this pad and then put it on the floor as far as I can get it away from me. I rest the entire contraption on a large book to prevent it from resting on the rug itself. When I am at another desk in my house, the entire contraption gets placed in a closet with the wires coming underneath the door and that makes the setup whisper quiet. My preference is to lessen the noise of the laptop fan/cooling pad fan.
take the laptop and use the vacuum cleaner to blow the dust out of it. Then sell the heating pad on Ebay. Check it on youtube. the guy will show lyou how to do it. Good luck.
I use Speedfan. It's a free program that lets you control your laptop fan. Mine would come on intermittently and make alot of stop and go noise. Now I have the fan running all the time @ lower speed. Muuuch better. I was about to ditch the laptop, gotta love it. http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php Also, Sometimes these laptop fans are setup to come on at temperature much lower than they should. Something to check anyways.
I also use a T420s in a docking station. Mine runs really warm at times. Have you done something to address that issue? Albeit, I am running three monitors from it. I use tpfancontrol and have adjusted the power/fan settings, to no avail.
I'm a four pack a day smoker, plus I eat on top of my laptop keyboard. My sister bought me a battery operated vacumn cleaner for computers and it didn't work worth a shit. I just threw it in the trash. All my floors are hardwood so I don't even own a regular vacumn cleaner. 99.99% of the time I have my laptop (and that's all I trade with) on a dirty old foot stool. after a while, it started getting hot, and the fan came on I just tried to blow out the vents, used some windex on the keyboard, and started offsetting it on the cusioned foot stool so the vents were open. It's been months now since it got hot and the fan came on. Now I just put it back on the foot stool the way I always did. and I trade forex, so it is on like 24/5