Am I the only one who used a $3 phone stand as a laptop riser and cooked my own lap for a year?

Fiona Palmer · 2026-10-10T19:35:04.575624+00:00

I've been carting around this flimsy plastic phone stand I got from a gas station rack in Reno for about $3, and for the longest time I just used it to hold my phone at lunch. Then one day my neck was killing me from hunching over my old ThinkPad on the couch, so I propped the back of the laptop on it and figured I was a genius. Fast forward like 8 months and I noticed the bottom of the laptop was warm enough to make my thighs sweat through my jeans, and the fan was screaming nonstop. I finally flipped it over and saw the stand had pushed the whole thing up at an angle that blocked the intake vents along the back edge. The tip off was when a buddy sat next to me and said my laptop sounded like a hair dryer, and it hit me that I'd been cooking the poor thing every single day. I swapped it out for two old cassette cases instead and the fan went quiet in maybe 10 minutes. Now I'm wondering how many other people are out there choking their intake vents with some silly cheap stand they grabbed on a whim. What's the dumbest thing you've propped a laptop on because it was within arm's reach?

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Am I the only one who used a $3 phone stand as a laptop riser and cooked my own lap for a year? | Bargain Bin Tech - Pinecone Attack