- Compute and Still Multiply
As I write this, I'm sitting on a commuter train and my laptop is resting comfortably on my lap. It's the perfect melding of form and function. Unfortunately, some people believe that this very act could make me somewhat, um, less functional.
My guess is that, by now, you've heard the reports that laptop use could be hazardous to your reproductive health. This problem doesn't occur with women (at least nothing has been proven or even researched in that area), only men. Apparently, some laptops generate enough heat on their bases to cause temporary infertility when it is transferred to your lap.
Sperm, according to the laws of physiology, thrive in temperatures considerably below our body's normal 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. According to men's health experts, sperm production decreases at temperatures around 104 degrees, and abnormal sperm can even begin appearing. Some laptops generate upwards of 100 degrees, and I remember how some of the early tablet PCs were almost too hot to hold. Today's fastest mobile CPUs consume considerable power, which means they'll generate more heat. In fact, one PC Magazine Labs analyst told me that the reason Intel's Sonoma chipset took so long to arrive was because developers were struggling to reduce the heat it produced.
Heat you can feel is one thing, but we're not thermometers, and I defy anyone to tell the difference, by touch, between 95 and 120 degrees. To test this theory and more, we picked up a thermometer designed to read surface temperatures from your child's forehead. The $40 SAAT ThermoTek Temple thermometer accurately read my body temperature, so I decided to try it out on a few laptops in the labs. Depending on where I placed the thermometer, the temperatures ranged from 95 to over 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The hottest spots on the portables were wherever the central and graphics CPUs resided. Most small, ultralight laptops remained pretty cool, but when I tried some of the larger systems, especially the desktop replacement notebooks, I found more heat. To be fair, this is because some of these big, 10-pound units contain desktop CPUs. Put one of those in a tiny laptop chassis with only vents and a relatively small fan for cooling, and temperatures will climb. One of the desktop replacements was cooking at 107 degrees.
This all sounds kind of scary, but the reality is that most current laptops, though far more powerful than their predecessors, do a much better job of managing power and dissipating heat. There are fans, heat sinks, and low-power modes that keep even the fastest laptop cool. Still, the heat levels I found on some laptops after they had been plugged into an AC outlet and running for at least a few hours were a bit surprising, and I realized that this is the kind of uncharted territory where taking action could have some benefits. So I came up with seven easy tips for avoiding heat sterilization. Continue reading for the tips...