Tired of my laptop dying every now and then, I have taken drastic action.

The Acer Travelmate 2420 is very badly designed where it comes to heat management. Air is sucked in from under the laptop (where your leg or the table would block the airflow) and blown out the side of the machine. A smarter arrangement might be to suck in air from above the keyboard and blow it out the side, but hell – what do I know about laptop design…

Anyway – the problem is that the bottom hole is too easily blocked, and besides, the fan is crap – doesn’t pull in enough air.

The solution is to give the fan a helpful boost. So, what I did was to build a small platform from cardboard, and stick three Thermaltake fans in it, each of which was more powerful than the laptop fan. This causes a large airflow through the laptop, keeping the usually-roasting right side of the machine actually colder than the rest of the machine!

1. front view – laptop is at perfect angle for working at. 2. back view – shows the three fans. 3. left view – my hacked power-supply (normal four-wire power cable with two of the wires hooked to a 12v PSU). 4. top view – shows the air hole which sits directly under the laptop fan, and a cardboard block at the bottom middle which helps keep the laptop in place (along with the two grooves on either side).