It's our first day at the Miami New Times new offices, and to celebrate, we treated ourselves to a fancy, ergonomic laptop cooling dock from diamond-in-the-rough retailer, Kohl's, in Hialeah.
First, a brief explanation as to why we need said fancy, ergonomic laptop machine.
Last week, we noticed that the bottom of our MacBook Pro was dangerously hot. The laptop was running uncomfortably slow, and our work became increasingly difficult to execute. Fed up with Apple's refusal to add cooling fans to its MacBook line, we almost gave-up and ordered a Dell, but couldn't access our Internet--we also blame the internal temperature of the computer for that. Fan-less and sans Google, we decided to run a few experiments on the laptop.
Hoping to start a fire, we placed the hot computer on pile of
paper. At the 12-minute mark, we gave up. The laptop wasn't hot enough
to start a fire, but it did warm the papers to about the same
temperature a commercial copy machine does.
Our
second experiment would've made us Internet famous had we successfully
accomplished our mission. The idea was to light a cigarette using the
hottest part of the laptop and post the video on YouTube. We tried, but
failed miserably.
The bottom line, our
computer wasn't hot enough to burn papers or spark up tobacco, but it
was, however, too hot to get anything done. Desperate for a quick fix,
we embarked on a journey to find the perfect cooling solution, and a tip
from a budget-conscious source led us to 49th Street in Hialeah.
"Bro,
I bought an iHome radio at Kohl's in Hialeah for like, I don't know,
twenty bucks. I bet they have something--a cooling pad or whatever--for
your laptop."
When we got to the store, we asked--in Spanish--the first employee we found if they carried cooling pads for laptops.
"Que?" they replied. "Cooling pads? No se lo que es."
We
thanked the store clerk for his help, told him not to worry about it,
that we'd look around to see if we found one. Sure enough, near the
shoe department and across the aisle from a section of vacuum cleaners,
we found a "Fan Cooled Lapdesk" for just $14.99.
We grabbed it, showed the clerk what we meant by "laptop cooling pad," and walked out of Kohl's with our new gadget.
It's
only Monday, and it's our first day using the ergonomic cooling pad. So
far so cool, but check back Friday for our product testing
week-in-review.