Laptop Stands can keep your laptop running smoothly

Inside Laptops there are lots of complicated electrical gizmos that make a lot of heat.  The faster these components run, the more heat they make and if nothing is done to get rid of it then the computer can literally melt itself!

All laptops use lots of mini fans to keep themselves cool, a car engine uses a great giant fan to do the same job.  Now if you place your laptop on a cushion or a pair of baggy clothes then you are in fact BLOCKING the little air vents that are vital to keep everything cool!

What happens when you block the air vents?

1. The hardware slows down all it’s operations to produce less heat
2. The fans go berserk and make a horrid whirling noise
3. You shorten the lifespan of the laptop’s battery

Now purchasing a little laptop rest or stand like the one shown it the picture could save you a lot of over-heating problems in the present and future, also they’re very comfortable and your laptop sticks to them quite well, all-in-all a top buy…

Laptop stands can also help with holding a notebook computer in place; both rests and stands are designed to keep air flowing underneath and at the sides of the laptop at all times.  An added bonus to these devices is not having the heat from the laptop burn your lap as it stands on your legs!

Click here to purchase a Laptop Rest or Laptop Stand

A hot room or direct sunlight will slow the inner working of laptops down

Did you know that NASA scientists put some of thier computers in liquid nitrogen so they can run them uber-fast?!

The cooler a computer is, the better it runs.  A laptop already gets mightily hot inside with all it’s power hungry components, these get cooled by lots of little fans and air racks called “heat sinks”.  If the air being drawn into the laptop is already hot then it’s not going to work half as good is it?

If a laptop gets too hot then it starts using less power to product less heat from the electricity; this unfortunately means a big slow down for all programs and operations.

Get your laptop out of direct sunlight and keep it in a well ventilated, cool room.

If you cannot achieve this environment then one option is sticking a big fan just above the laptop.  Make sure you don’t point the fan directly at the laptop or you may ruin the flow of air inside, we just want the wasted hot vented air to be blown away.

Don't use the battery if you don't need to

A very quick tip here for your laptop – don’t run it off the battery at all if you can help it.

If you run your laptop of the mains then you’ll keep your battery as good as new as it never really needs to use it.
Keep running the laptop off the battery power then you’ll notice it’s charge deteriorates over time until it can only last two minutes before dying on you!

If you buy a laptop rest then most have a little handy hole to shove the power converter in and all you have to do is locate the nearest plug.  I know a laptop should be mobile but most of the time people just use it in the very same spot so why not look after it a little?!

Did you know your laptop can run in different power modes?

You can run your laptop efficiently which dims the screen and never taxes the processor too hard to save battery life.  This is great if you are travelling on the train for example and cannot plug your laptop in, you may find the computer will stay alive another hour or two with this setting!

If you have the laptop running off the mains then why skimp on this power-saving mode?  Unless the battery is in great need of a recharge you should tell Windows to run the whole system as fast as possible and make your screen as bright as you want it!  Loading times for programs will half and you’ll see streaming video like from YouTube run without any annoying jitter.

So how do you change these settings?  Most laptop makers show a little plug & battery icon in the bottom right icon tray, if you cannot see it then click the little arrow to see all the icons present:

Reveal the hidden icons in the icon tray if you cannot see the battery image

Click the left mouse button once on the battery icon and chose the correct setting

Remember to switch the power mode settings back to “power saver” mode when you’re not running from the mains or you’ll damage the battery’s longevity

Don't start up loads of program at once

When you switch your laptop on how long do you have to wait until you can properly use it?  Even if you do stop a lot of programs from starting up with Windows things can be painfully slow when you computer is getting upto speed.

Behind the scenes lots and lots of little programs run themselves when you start Windows from boot up plus your internet card is trying to connect to the internet and your anti-virus may be updating itself.

If you try and open your browser, music player, email client etc. whilst the computer is still starting up then expect a computer traffic jam!

This bottle neck effect will jam up the processor as it has 40 or so jobs to do at once already.  If you keep making it run extra programs then it’ll do each job bit by bit and the overall time it takes is a lot longer that if they all ran separately.

The best thing to do is be patient, go and make yourself a cup of tea or do some stretches whilst your laptop wakes up from it’s slumber!

Want to time how long it takes to get upto speed with your laptop?  Try pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL at any time and you’ll bring you the task manager:

You can see on the “Performance” tab what percentage of your processor is being used every second.  When it gets to a steady 1 – 5% usage then you can open up other programs and avoid any bottle necking.  Another good indicator of when your computer is not extremely busy with programs is when the hard drive stops making that annoying ticky sound.  When new SSD technology comes out for hard drives this problem will be a thing of the past, bring on the new technology!

P.S. You can use the task manager to see what “Processes” are taking up the most memory and processor power if Windows is being consistantly slow