Installation and Operation:
To test Hiyatek's laptop cooler I placed it under my Dell Inspiron and connected the USB cable. This laptop may not be the latest and greatest, but with a Mobile Pentium 4 2.0GHz processor, 1GB of DDR memory, and a 120GB hard drive, it does quite nicely for me. It can also generate some serious heat, and it seems like the internal fan ramps up quite often to try to deal with it. At full speed the laptop's fan is quite loud, and if I can get the laptop cooler to keep the internal fan from coming on as often, I will be pleased.
The image below shows the backside of the laptop with the Hiyatek cooler underneath. The included USB cable is all that needs to be connected, so installation is simple and should only take a matter of seconds. The operating system on this computer is Windows XP Home, which auto-detected the card reader and USB hub, and for those with older operating systems there is the mini-CD of drivers.
As shown in the picture above, the AC power adaptor was not necessary, as the computer was able to power the fans, card reader, and USB hub solely via the USB bus. If needed, simply plug the adaptor into the small port right next to the mini USB connection. Even with the system unplugged and running on batteries, everything still worked fine, although I did notice about a 30% hit on the life of the battery while using the Hiyatek HY-CF-6157-01. Additional power drain has to be expected, so that was no big deal to me.
One thing to keep in mind with power consumption was made apparent to me when I closed the lid on the laptop to let it sleep while not in use. Even though the laptop had essentially powered down, the cooler's fans kept spinning. This is not the fault of the cooler, but of the laptop, as power to the USB ports should be killed in this state, and for most users perhaps a setting in their BIOS is all that it would take to remedy this. Otherwise, if the system is running on batteries, but put to sleep when not in use, the battery will drain considering it is still working to power the 3 fans in the cooler.
The below left image shows the front of the cooler while in operation. The red LED is illuminated whenever a media card is inserted into one of the slots, and if you look closely you can see an SD card is present. When data is being transferred to/from a media card the red LED flickers, otherwise it is on constantly. The green LED indicates that the cooler is receiving power. In between the two LEDs you can see a small dial which is the manual speed control for the 3 fans. Although there is no indicator that the fans have been turned off, if you spin it all the way down, they do come to a stop.
 
The above right image shows that the depth of the cooler is just right for the Inspiron. In general, all dimensions of the cooler worked quite nicely with this laptop, but if you have a larger screen on yours it might not be such a nice fit. Anybody with a 17" screen on their laptop might think this cooler was too small, even though it still might do a good job keeping the underside cool.
The USB hub and card reader both worked perfectly. The laptop used for testing was only USB 1.1 capable, and although everything worked as well as possible there, I connected the cooler to a desktop PC to see if the full speed of USB 2.0 was available. Transfers between onboard USB ports and through the Hiyatek hub were nearly identical, so there is no need for concern about a speed loss while using this device. The only thing of interest with the card reader is that the SD card had to be installed upside down in order to work. All other cards install with their labels up, but SD/MMC cards need to be installed label side down.
My only issue here is with the USB hub placement. As you can see in the above left image, your USB devices will be coming right at you when in use. I found this to be a little inconvenient and would prefer the hub to be on the side, preferably the left side, to keep it out of the way. With cables, drives, or whatever else might be plugged in, it would be best to have it away from the user or the typical mousing area (sorry lefties).
Now on to the serious matter of cooling. I left the fans on full speed just about all the time, as the noise really was minimal to me. And considering that the internal fan rarely comes on any more, there is actually a noise reduction while the laptop is in use. The internal fan seemed like it was always coming on before, and now it took a combination of scans from Ad-Aware, Grisoft AVG, and Spybot Search and Destroy to warm it up enough to come back on. In typical use I was seeing a 8-12 degree drop on outer skin temperature (using a digital thermal probe), but this number would go up and down depending on the circumstances. The lack of activity by the internal fan was my true test of performance, and I would say that it passed nicely.
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