Of Mice and DVD Drives

By Jerry Pournelle

November 7, 2005

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Column 303 (Continued from the Previous Week)

APC Ergonomic Notebook Stand

The most convenient home position for my IBM T42p ThinkPad is atop Princess, a desktop (not tower) Compaq Dual Pentium Plus Desktop Pro workstation. Long time readers will remember that Princess has been with me for a decade, has never been out of use, and except for some new memory and additional hard drives is pretty well the same machine that Compaq sent engineer Harvey Kwong out to install for me. She is now used largely for web searches, and she's plenty fast enough for that.

I can't bring myself to retire Princess, but she does sit in prime office space, so she has to serve as a roost for Orlando the IBM T42p ThinkPad. Usually that works out all right, but Orlando has some very powerful video capabilities, and sometimes he gets warm. When he gets warm enough the fan goes on, and while it's endurable, it's a bit noisy.

There's also the problem of the DVD drive: on thin laptops that drive doesn't have a lot of space to work in, and it's very close to the desk.

Then I got the APC Ergonomic Notebook Stand. This is a portable stand that you can put your laptop on. It holds it up off the desk surface. That lets air circulate. The last time Orlando got noisy, I put him on this stand. The fan stopped instantly. The stand is steady enough to work on. It will fold small enough to stick into a brief case, or in with your laptop in its carrying case.

Orlando the IBM ThinkPad rests on the APC Ergonomic Notebook Stand atop Princess, our stately Compaq Desktop Work Station. That's the IOGEAR Laser Mouse in the foreground.

Fortunately we had two of the stands: Dan Spisak has noted that his Mac PowerBook can get awfully hot with hard use, and this stand fits the PowerBook quite well.

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