Modern Apple 'Books, from roughly the 1 GHz PowerPCs on up, and especially the Intel-based MacBook Pros and MacBooks offer great performance but at a price - heat. The speedy G4, Core Duo, Core 2 Duo and Santa Rosa processors and powerful video accelerator cards that give our 'Books near-desktop power these days create lots of heat, and have spawned a booming market in third-party solutions to help keep your laptop's torrid underside from singing your thighs or damaging furniture. Heat also shortens the life of electronic components, and can degrade performance of high bandwidth devices.

Most notebook auxiliary cooling solutions work on a passive convection principle by elevating the computer from the work surface, allowing air to circulate underneath carrying away heat and letting the machine cool more efficiently. However, a few products take a more proactive approach to cooling, using powered cooling fans to suck heat away from the computer's underside.

The COOLdock Laptop Stand is one such device, with two cooling fans built into the computer support tray to suck heat away from your computer. The fans draw their power from a USB port on the computer, but no worries about using up a precious USB port - the COOLdock unit also includes a four=port USB 2 hub in its base.

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