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votes
Stacking laptops
I might have to have two running laptops for work.
Desk space is at a premium. Right now I have my work laptop stacked on top of my personal PC on my desk ( tower, on its side, on a stand ).
Would a rack like this one, with a lap top on each shelf be enough to keep the magnets on the lids of each laptop from interfering with each other? What about protecting each laptop from the heat of the other laptop?
I already have a mechanical KVM. I will just need to buy one that accommodates more than 2 computers.
Please, let me know if I have overlooked any considerations.
Thank you.
Yes, that would work.
The magnets are much less powerful than you're probably thinking. They're only there to trigger a lid-closing sensor on the other side. You could place the laptops directly on top of each other and it'd be magnetically fine.
Heat is the bigger concern. Anything that keeps them a couple of inches apart and doesn't block the fans is good enough, unless you have very hot laptops.
Might depend on the model. I have seen the magnets trigger the lid-close action (e.g. sleep) on a laptop stacked directly on top. Those were Dell Latitudes, maybe other vendors have weaker magnets.
You could just stack them rotated 180º to avoid that, but like you said, heat dissipation is the bigger issue.
I've rigged such setups using 8 children's blocks (4 under each laptop) and a USB fan I had lying around for extra heat dissipation. Works great provided you never need to lift the lid of the bottom laptop.
Thank you!
Have you considered a vertical laptop holder? I have this one and it has met all of my expectations. It's a little annoying to adjust to the right size, but once you do it once, it's done for good.
https://a.co/d/eF4Vn3h
I would love to do this with my work laptop, but I have to lift the lid to make the stupid thing wake up.
I wonder if there's some way I can trick the lid sensor.
You can’t change the closed lid behavior? Windows and MacOS have settings that change what your computer does when you close the lid. Maybe you can change it to not go to sleep when the lid is closed.
Edit: Here's a PC Magazine article on how to do this for Windows.
I actually do want it to sleep. It doesn't need to be on outside of work hours.
I want to be able to wake it without physically lifting the lid. I've poked at bios settings and power options in windows and nothing will let me do it with my mouse or keyboard (wired, but a kvm switch I use to toggle between personal desktop and work laptop).
I'm tempted to see if I can figure something out with magnets, but I'm not sure if that would help me with my end goal - to get the laptop (physically) off of my desk.
The only thing I'm really aware of is, if you're connected to a compatible thunderbolt dock, using the dock's power button, since thunderbolt gives lots of hardware access. But on thunderbolt 3, there's no standard - an HP laptop won't be able to use a Dell thunderbolt dock and have the power button work because they don't communicate properly.
AFAIK, thunderbolt 4 defines a standard, so hopefully this problem gets fixed in the future.
I feel obligated to interject that the best dock available is the TS3+ (or TS4 depending on your needs). Buy used if you want to save money. Accept no substitutes.
Are you talking about the CalDigit TS3+? I'm not seeing a way to power on with a power button on the dock while the laptop lid is closed. Is that supported functionality?
I found this post that has a solution for this. You can set an external keyboard or mouse to wake up your laptop from sleep. As long as you don’t shut your laptop down, you wouldn’t have to open the lid to press the power button.
Edit: Also apparently there is something called wake on LAN that you can configure. It would allow you to use another device on your network to wake up your laptop if that’s a better solution than moving the mouse or pressing a key on the keyboard.
Unfortunately that "solution" is exactly what I'm doing. Like the person who replied, it doesn't work for me either.
I've set nearly every device in device manager to have the ability to wake up the computer from sleep, but it doesn't. Adjusted all the power profile settings.
I don't think Wake on LAN is an option because I don't have wired Ethernet to it. (It doesn't even have an Ethernet port, but even if I bought an adapter, I'd have to run cable.)
If you're using Linux, you can configure that behavior with systemd.
I once accomplished this by physically removing the magnets that would trigger the lid sensor.
You should probably not do this on a machine you don't own.
Very interesting design! I'll have to measure my space and make a list of what I want things to be like.
Thank you!
I have designed and 3d printed several different laptop holders. The advantage to 3d printed design is that you could let you customize the holder, e.g. how big the slots are, maybe give it side flaps or something so it grips the top of the tower, or bolts tonthe wall, or whatever. Maybe even something to make it easy to crack the work laptop open to wake it up, if you have an ides of East would work
It doesn't sound like a very complicated design, so I'd be happy to crank something out for you, and even print it if you'd pay for materials and shipping. Just DM me if you're interested.
I found out I can order those things through my company. Thanks for the very nice offer.
Like @em-dash says, anything that allows for some airflow between them should be pretty much fine, so that shelf looks good to me - as long as they’re not literally resting on top of each other I wouldn’t worry too much unless they were high power draw portable gaming/workstation machines.
Putting a small fan beside the rack to keep the air moving and/or stacking them side by side on their edges is also an option if you’re really concerned about the heat rising up from the one lower down (I’ve seen it done with six laptops in a cheap IKEA plate rack, because that many really would have cooked the top one if they’d been stacked above each other!), but again I’d only be thinking about that if they were hotter than the average laptop. Plus not every machine’s cooling system likes being oriented on its edge, so that’s another thing to check if you are going that direction.
Thank you!