I probably looks like nothing’s there because the picture is so big and the lines are so small, but if you click on it, you’ll be able to see it better. The red lines are the smaller streets. The blue line is for medium streets (well, there’s only one for now). The green is for major streets and the yellow is the railroad.

So, as you can see, the layout, at least as far as the roads are concerned, has not changed much. There a some places where I deleted some roads or added some, but overall, it’s the same basic town. Just for comparative purposes, here is the actual map that I stitched together from Bing maps:

Anyways, the next time you see this map, I’ll have most of the general aspects done (i.e., the roads brushes, some colorization). Lemme know what you think!

Laptops run really hot, especially when gaming. You know it, I know it, the people suffering from Toasted Skin Syndrome know it. Laptops run hot because of inefficient cooling. Most intake air from the bottom and blow it out the side and since your laptop sits only a fraction of an inch off whatever surface it’s on, it doesn’t get the air it needs to be properly cooled. Couple that with a dirty fan and you’ve got some major overheating issues. This tutorial aims to help you build you very own laptop cooling pad with things you may already have around the house. You may find that you can buy an already assembled cooling pad cheaper, but when possible, I prefer to do things myself. That and after reading all the reviews on various cooling pads, I couldn’t come up with one I was completely satisfied with spending my money on.

Tools and Supplies:

• Heat shrink of various sizes or electrical tape if you don’t have any heat shrink
• Solder
• Soldering Iron
• 5v/0.35A Computer fans as needed
• A rack of some sort to mount the fans (preferably something that sits a full inch or two off the table)
• Unneeded USB Cable
• Small zip ties for wire routing purposes
• Razor blade or electrician’s knife

The first thing you are going to want to do is find a rack to mount everything to. I used a freezer drawer from a fridge that my brother and I had to cut apart because it wouldn’t fit out my door. Of course, I had to make some adjustments to get it to work for this purpose, but the finished product was satisfactory (I used a dremel tool to cut away parts I didn’t want). You should try to find a rack where the bars that make the rack up are about an inch apart. This will help greatly when mounting your fans as the small, 5v ones are about 2 inches square.

I realize that this next section here would benefit from pictures greatly, but as I said above, I didn’t take pics of the process itself, only of the finished product.

Fit your laptop to the rack you have so you can mark where you’ll need the fans placed. I placed a fan everywhere I could see the motherboard through the holes in the bottom, which was 3 places. You might have more, you might have less and it might be overkill to place 3 fans on this fan, but I had 3 lying around and thus decided to use 3 fans.

Take your USB cable and cut off the end that doesn’t connect to your computer. Inside you’ll find four wires. We are only concerned about the black and red ones. The black is the ground and the red is the 5v power line. If the wires aren’t colored like this, you’ll need a multi-meter to test for ground and power while the cable is plugged in to your computer. Tie back and insulate the unused wires with heat shrink or tape. This is accomplished by simply folding the wire over and putting heat shrink over it. I usually just fold the wire over at the halfway point. When you are putting the shrink or tape on, make sure the conductor of the wire isn’t exposed. I’m not telling you to just cut them off because we want to ensure that the wires will not touch anything.

Next go ahead and cut the connectors off your fans. Hopefully you bought fans with only two wires, because there are some that have a third wire. What you’ll need to do now is tie all the fans together to the USB cable. Go ahead and slip a 2 or three-inch piece of shrink onto the USB cable now because you won’t be able to this after the next step. Be sure not to heat it up just yet.

Solder all the red wires together and put shrink over the solder joint. Do the same for the black wires. Slide that peice of shrink I talked about earlier over the whole thing now.

The result should look something like the picture to the left. For those of you who are using electrical tape, the same principles apply.

Feel free to go ahead and test your set up now to make sure it works before you start mounting anything. You don’t want to mount everything only to find that the setup won’t work.

Use your zip ties to mount all the fans to the rack. You could also pretty it up by routing all the wiring like I have done in the picture below with zip ties. Alternatively, you could use your electrical tape to wrap the wires in; entirely up to you. At this point, you may want to consider adding some feet to the bottom of your cooler so that it doesn’t scratch what it’s sitting on. I used the rubber bottoms from house pool cue sticks. You may also want to put some rubber or foam down where the laptop will sit on the cooler, without blocking the fans of course.

This setup, when plugged in, will run constantly and at full speed, so make sure you’re plugged in at all times because it will kill your battery. Also, while I haven’t done it to mine yet, you could set up a way to control the speed of your fans and a way to turn it off and on. The voltage outputs in a USB port cannot be controlled with software, so you’ll likely want to use a 1k Ohm potentiometer for speed control and a single pole, single throw switch for on/off control, though I guess if you turn the pot all the way down, the fans will be off. I’d rather have a dedicated switch for it, though.

And that’s about it. I really enjoyed building this thing and it works beautifully. This setup literally cools my laptop to below room temperature, and I can now enjoy playing PC games for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time.

DISCLAIMER: I used high-end AVC ball-bearing fans for this project which normally go for $10-15 bucks a piece, so I can’t guarantee you’ll have the same results as I did using cheaper fans. Also be sure you get the proper fans for this, because fans that require more than 5 volts won’t work. So no PC case fans for this.