MBP 15.4" used as a Desktop?

Hello all.

About 1.5-2 months ago I purchased an Acer 5672WLMi because of the insanely low price Compusa was advertising it for. Anyway, it's great as a laptop, however when I'm at the house, I'm primarily using it as a desktop. I built a little docking area to hold my gateway lcd, some other perphirials and lastly, the acer to slide underneath everything with the lid closed. There-in lies the problem; Acer's heat dissipates through the keyboard, so you can only imagine the laptop's lcd and thekeyboard and palmrests are extremely HOT to the touch. This just is not acceptable because it could eventually damage something; I would assume.

I used to be a powerbook owner back in the day, but never used it too much because I had a normal windows desktop that was my primary machine; well I decided to move to having just a laptop as my main machine. I would love to move back to a mac due to the hardware and bootcamp additions to the macbookpro.

Will I be able to close the MBP's lid and plug up my lcd, and bluetooth mouse/keyboard and use it as a desktop without fear of crazy heat affecting the lcd, keyboard, trackpad, etc? I realize there will be some heat, but you can't even switch off the Acer's lcd, you can only lower the brightness such that it is barely lit.

Anyway, any help is much appreciated because this is the main factor holding me back.

Cheers,
-defsquad

 

You're definately going to have some heat issues if you do that - the MBP has one heat vent in the rear, and if I'm not mistake, when the lid is closed, part of the screen's hinge blocks about half of the vent. The notebook already has some heat issues without this, so I can't image how a partially blocked vent would affect it.

 

I might be a nervous MBP owner, but if I use my mbp for long enough to get it extremely hot, I don't even shut the lid while it cools down. (because of the aluminum the heat dispenses fast but at the same time the laptop cools down dang fast). I don't want my LCD to get hurt in anyway, so I keep it open for a minute or two while it cools down. I would recommend the same to you. Personally, I wouldn't buy a mbp if you are just going to hook a monitor up to it because of the heat. Now another point though of the MBP, the LCD screen is ALWAYS COOL, ALWAYS. Even after hours of use and my whole MBP (but they keyboard and keypad) is hot as heck, the LCD screen is still very cool.

Hope that info helped some

 

That's a good point Stu - totally forgot that the machine is powerful enough to drive 2 ex. mons. I'll be getting a cooling pad to make sure that it stays cool. Found several in asia that worked really well for onlya couple of bucks and comes with 4 USBs too

 

Wow, thanks so much for all of the response everyone!.yeah i definitely had considered re building my shelf setup to accommodate using the laptop in a dual display fashion, it just seeems weird having one huge lcd and then the laptop lcd beside each other, maybe i can do like one above the other or something like that. i definitely still want the MBP regardless of using it in a dual display format or not.

 

I have my MBP setup today with it's DVI connected to a Dell 2001FP. Dual screen goodness is almost a requirement for me as a software developer. Eclipse open on the Dell, Entourage and Safari on the MBP LCD. I had the same setup on my Inspiron 9200 running Ubuntu, but OS X was a lot easier to configure (just plug in the DVI cable, no xorg.conf silliness to mess with).

 

where do u get cooling pads ?