Effective ways of cooling a laptop...

Are there any other ways to effectively cool a laptop without having to use one of those cooling pads?  I have an Inspiron 600m and use it for almost everything when I'm away at college.  For some reason, all of the heat is generate where the HD is located...because of all of the heat generated, the 40GB HD that came with it was fried and I decided to get a 60GB one...I don't want this one to get fried.  Any and all suggestions are welcome. 

How long have you had it? If it's been longer than six months or so, you've almost certainly got some lovely big dust bunnies growing inside the fans/heatsinks. I had overheating problems with my laptop until I stripped it down, pulled out all the gunk clogging it up and put fresh thermal compound on the CPU heatsink.  Avoid using it on a soft surface (on carpet or a bed, for example) since it both hinders cooling and increases dust intake, and if the weather is particularly hot, point a desk fan at it while using it to keep moving the hotter air away. You could also check that you've set the computer up to spin down the hard disk when it's not being used. Sadly, some laptops are poorly designed when it comes to heat dissipation, so you just have to be sensible with it.

That reminds me of my laptop. For some strange reason the idiots who designed it put the DIMM slots right under the hard drive. The CPU vent is also underneath on one corner, exactly where a person's leg if they don't have a table.

I think they hired monkeys to do the layout, I really do.

Hmm...sounds alot like my 600m, 3. :\

Anyways, I have had the laptop longer than 6 months...and I don't know where I could get some thermal compound...Right now, I have the biggest fan in the house pointing at it and it's fortunately not hot at all right now. -_- 

If having a fan pointing at it is helping, it sounds as though it could simply be a problem of it not getting the heated air away quick enough. Even propping the back of the laptop on book, and only using it on a hard surface, could help - you need to keep the vents as exposed as you can.

Crap, if I had known owning a laptop would mean having my own heater, I would have gone with a desktop computer...but meh.

>>6
Desktops are not any better, I have a small server room in my basement and I just had to recently build a air intake straight from the outside because it was getting so hot :/

Ahh...so I just have the misfortune of having a machine that likes to overheat.  Then again, I used it like a desktop before the old HD croaked...

Get a cooler laptop.
Or put the one you've got on a mound of snow.

>>9 Ohh yes, putting my computer on a mound of snow sounds great.  Why not lend me your machine after mine dies, huh? :)