Cool Feet review

Sat, 3 February 2007

One thing I always hated on my MacBook Pro was the absence of any feet that would raise the back of the computer, making it easier to type.

Thankfully Cool Feet (by Bluelounge) come to the rescue. Cool Feet is a set of medium-hard rubber feet that lifts your laptop on the back and the front, allowing for more comfortable, ergonomic position of your keyboard. It also lifts your laptop off the desk, allowing for more air circulation that provides better cooling of your machine.

Cool Feet are easily attached and held by suction cup, so no glue is needed. The pack includes four adhesive plates that you can stick to the bottom of your laptop and then attach the Cool Feet to it.

I was a little disappointed that there was only one set of adhesive plates, thinking - what if I change my laptop at some time, but the suction cups keep the Cool Feet firmly attached to you machine even without adhesive plates. In fact, I’m using it that way now, so this is not a problem at all.

One thing I like about Cool Feet is that they come in two pairs, tall and short ones, so you can attach them in different ways and position your laptop for your best comfort.

You can have only two short feet on the back…

…or tall ones on the back and short ones at the front,

or have only the tall ones on the back, having a steeper keyboard if that suits you better.

If you decide to use the tall feet only, you need to be very careful when inserting or ejecting the CD/DVD, the disk will push against the desk and may get scratched. To avoid this you may want to slightly lift the front of your laptop.

And there is another nice thing about Cool Feet, it includes a small bag, so when you are moving around and put your laptop into the bag, Cool Feet have their own bag too.

What about the temperature ? I ran a few tests under the following conditions:

Computer: MacBook Pro, 1.83 GHZ, 1GB RAM, OS 10.4.8
Room temperature: 26 C
CPU load: 42-51 %
Running: iTunes 7.1, 128 bit MP3s with visualiser in approximately 1000×600 pixel screen
Test duration: 20 minutes, temperature measured at the and of the period.
Temperature measured with: smcFanControl, fans speed - 2000 rpm

The fan in table below is a small desk fan that sits about 1m awaw from my computer and blow is barely noticeable. See the little grey fan on the picture below.

And these are the results:

MacBook Pro with:	No fan	With fan
No feet	57 C	55 C
Small feet only	56 C	52 C
Small and tall feet	54 C	51 C

Obviously the more air flow, the laptop will feel cooler. Add some airflow undeneath the laptop and the difference is even greater.

The measuring technique used may not be the most accurate, but never the less it shows that elevating your laptop off the desk helps in keeping it cool. I guess measuring the temperature on the laptop surface would surely be a more accurate indicator, but any thermometre I had was meant to hang on the wall or sit on the shelf.

At the end I would like to say thank you to Derek from Try & Byte for providing free samples for this review.

You can buy Cool Feet from Try & Byte for only $19.95 (AUD) including GST.

One last thing. My nine year old daughter thought that photographing the photographer is kind of cool, so here is her work - capturing my work.

Stumble it!

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Posted in Hardware, Reviews