Electronics : Belkin F5L001 Laptop Cooling Stand

Rating: - Works but made cheap
I bought this cooler a month ago. It works. It keeps my laptop 20 degrees cooler. However, at times the fan just stops working. One of the little black pieces of the fan broke off, and the door just snapped off when I closed it. It is very cheaply made.

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Rating: - I'm finally done looking for a laptop stand...
I've been through four or five different stands over the past year or so. I spend a lot of time working from home in the IT field, and many late nights reclining on the couch while I remote into networks. Every other one I got had airflow from top to bottom. Did me no good because my Thinkpad pulls air in from the bottom to flow through the unit and out the sides. So having fans try to pull air DOWN actually would worsen my thermal situation.

All of them had fan units that couldn't be reversed, and they all had something klunky about them anyway. Most sounded like a jet at the end of runway running up its engines. A few had nasty little screw hole covers as "feet" that were nothing but soft material with sticky backs that never held them in the bases - and I'd find them stuck to my pants, to my shirt, to my table...

This one is top noch. The bottom of the base is curved, so if you don't have the rear support in the "down" position, it fits incredibly comfortably on the lap, no edges digging in that will get annoying after an hour or two. The fan is dead center, so even with the feet up and the unit on the lap, it will get air coming into the fan from the "valley" created by the legs.

Fan is nice and quite. NOT silent, by any means, but after everything else I've had, it's darn close. Not something that would get annoying after a while. I'm using it without the fan more often than not since even just having this on the lap gives more room for airflow under the laptop than it has sitting on a desk or table anyway.

Great unit, worth every penny. Wish I had got this one much sooner.

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Rating: - Cheap -- works but keeps falling apart and buzzes
This cooling stand does its job but it is poorly constructed and badly designed. I use it only in an office so it has not been mis-treated. Its power socket has come loose twice (the second time I epoxied it in) and the fan assembly began to buzz loudly on start-up about a month after I bought it. Cleaning the fan, blowing it all out, has not fixed it. A sharp rap on the table (lifting assembly up and rapping it down) causes it to work quietly the rest of the day. At $20, it offers my hot laptop good protection, and noticeably cools it (compared to unplugging it and feeling the laptop 10 minutes later) but when it finally dies I won't get another one from Belkin, that's for sure.

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Rating: - Mixed Feelings
A bit noisy then I would have expected. Also, it does not fit my laptop too well. Check well with the dimentions before getting it.

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Rating: - Great fit for a 15" Macbook Pro
Picked up one of these at Costco today for a bargain, and will be using it to replace a non-fan folding targus unit I have been using for years. Macbook Pros get really hot around the back of the case, and I have heard that this can dramatically reduce battery life.

The fan is obviously noisier than with no fan, but I would call it somewhat quieter than a typical laptop fan on "full cycle" but noisier than a laptop internal fan when in idle mode. (e.g. somewhere in the normal range of the noise a typical laptop makes). If you don't typically "max out" the CPU and processing capabilities of your laptop, you may find this fan (or any fan) adds a lot of noise to what you are used to.