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Anyone who works on a notebook while travelling has probably suffered from excess heat on the bottom chassis. Sometimes this can just be a mild nuisance, but hot spots develop on some models and make using the notebook in this way rather unpleasant. So anything that draws heat up and away from the base is bound to be an attractive idea.

On a notebook with a standard mobile processor Compal's technique could allow the use of smaller fans running at slower speeds, which in turn would reduce the fan's noise by up to 75 per cent. More excitingly, a notebook using a low voltage processor like the Intel Core 2 Solo U2200, could do without a fan entirely. Beyond the obvious

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reduction in operating noise, such a notebook could do away with numerous ventilation holes and vents, allowing it to be far more resistant to dust and liquids.

The functional prototype handled by Shopper felt rather warm on the bottom, though we were assured this was just because the processor was being run at 100 per cent for the purposes of the demonstration. Despite this, the display was kept well below the 55 degree C maximum temperature that the LCD panel is designed to operate within. The actual temperature never crossed 50 degrees C on the demo model.

There have been a number of studies linking low sperm counts to using notebook PCs on the lap. Compal's technology is unlikely to help solve this problem, as the majority of the temperature rises in those studies was attributed to the sitting position of the user, rather than heat radiated by the notebook itself. The main advantage of the new design is an increased level of comfort along with reduced fan noise.

Compal Electronics is a Taiwanese OEM manufacturer that supplies notebook chassis to major manufacturers like Dell and Toshiba, as well as numerous smaller companies, so we may well see notebooks with this lid cooling design generally available in the very near future.