Because of one “stalled car” on I5, a 30 minute routine trip took about 80 minutes today. Can the car not be moved to the side of the road? What’s the problem? Traffic was so bad that the person with whom I carpool was late for his meeting, and I would not have even made it to school before my class was finished.
Traffic is ridiculous. What a waste of a morning.
If I see one more person use “definatly” instead of definitely, I’m going to go crazy… it seems like I see it spelled as definatly even more than the correct spelling! Maybe only the people/write who say the word aren’t intelligible enough to spell it correctly.
Does definitely sound like “definatly”? Not even close. Where did this dumb misspelling come from, anyway?
Introduction:
I recently received the Antec Notebook Cooler from CompUSA for $10 after rebate. It was tested with my Dell Inspiron 700m 12″ Laptop.
While the 12″ laptop is comprised of a Centrino processor, it will still heat up for long use or cpu intensive activities; i.e. gaming or compiling.
If you’re a man using a notebook, and you wish to someday have kids, it’s very important that the lap is kept cooled. I won’t go into more detail, but you can google why if you wish 
.
Technical Specifications:
Heat is drawn away from the laptop with the fans and the aluminum surface of the notebook cooler, than exhausted out of the sides of the cooler.
My Impressions:
Pros: The first thing I noticed about the cooler was the design. It looks sleek, styling and blends in almost perfectly with my notebook. It’s lightweight, easy to use and very comfortable. It didn’t come with a manual, but it really did not need it. It took me about 1 minute to find the power cable (in a small compartment on the device), once it was found it was literally plug and play.
The extended corners would appear to fit any notebooks from 9″ to 19″ displays. I have a 12″ which is on the lowest end of the current spectrum, and it doesn’t feel like the cooler is too big for the notebook.
Cons: The cooler comes with a very short usb power cable to connect to the notebook. The power connector is on the side. This looks to be somewhat poor planning to me. If the notebook has only usb ports on the opposite side, it looks like the cooler would be be fully functional when rotated 180 degrees. However, what if the notebook has no side usb ports, only on the back? This was the case with my last laptop. I guess one would just get an usb extension cable?
There is a blue LED that shines rather brightly out of the side of the unit. I would think this is cool if it didn’t shine directly into the eyes of the person next to me.
The Test:
I setup the system to play Warcraft 3 for 1 hour. After the hour was completed, my lap was still as cool as room temperature. The laptop had done it’s job; it reverted the heat from the lap to elsewhere. This device proposes to cool down the notebook, which is something I don’t care about as much as keeping me cool while I use the notebook. As far as I am concerned, it thoroughly succeeded.
Conclusions:
There are a few minor issues with the cooler, but overall it does a great job and looks great doing it. It looks to be very versatile as far what is supported, and extremely easy to install and use. The price was great for me, and I am very glad that I have this product.
Overall: 9.5/10
See my pictures of the Antec Notebook Cooler.
My Brother’s wife is pregnant… with a due date around May 21st, 2006. Let’s see, why does that date ring a bell…
So he won’t be coming to my wedding, but I’m very happy for him and his wife. Congratulations!
I work at Autodesk as an intern. Recently, they’ve acquired Alias, and they appear to be doing very well as a company.
One of the “intern appreciation” gifts I just received is a NFR (Not for Resale) version of Autodesk Inventor 10 Professional , valued at over $5,195.00 (version listed is R10, I received R10 Pro).
Very nice. Took some pictures.
Edit 10/17/2005:
Yikes, check out those preferred system requirements:
Preferred System Requirements:
Includes Autodesk Vault client
Large assembly design (more than 1,000 parts)
- Intel Pentium 4, Intel Xeon, or AMD Opteron™ processor, 3 GHz or higher
- Microsoft® Windows® XP (Professional or Home Edition, SP1 or SP2) or Windows 2000 (SP4)
- 3 GB or more RAM
- 3.5 GB free disk space
- 128 MB or more OpenGL-capable workstation class graphics card
I gotta tell ya, the test systems we use at Autodesk for QA don’t even have “3 GB or more RAM”, that’s insane.
