How to Use a Laptop Elevator Stand

laptop elevator stand

The laptop elevator stand (also known as a laptop riser) raises the back of your laptop 9 inches or so off your desk while raising the front less than 2 inches. This creates an air gap between your laptop’s base and the solid surface underneath, letting any heat dissipated from your laptop slip through it into the surrounding air to help keep your computer cool. The stand also helps reduce wrist strain by putting your screen in a more comfortable position and by allowing you to move your laptop around to find the best angle for typing and viewing.

Many laptop users use stacks of books to elevate their computers, but while these do the job, they don’t help the screen stay angled in a comfortable position and don’t allow the laptop to “breathe” so it doesn’t overheat. The iLevel2 does all of this well, and it’s easy to use right out of the box.

You adjust the height and angle of this stand by holding the base piece with one hand while you lift up on the middle plate to set it. You can fully rotate the stand’s hinges, but they have a stopping point at which your laptop can no longer sit on top of it, to prevent accidental unbalanced situations.

This is an attractive stand with a circular design and sleek, cool-to-the-touch aluminum alloy material that feels durable and sturdy. It has a 360-degree rotating mechanism built into its base that makes it easy to turn your laptop to show someone else what you’re working on or to switch positions for optimum comfort.

To swivel the stand, you lift up on the left tray plate and pull a metal rectangle on a hinge away from the bottom of the tray’s backside, nestling it into one of five notches built into the plate’s frame. There’s a little resistance when adjusting this, which is ideal, but it can feel a bit awkward to do with just two hands while the stand is on your laptop.

When you’re done adjusting the height and angle of this stand, you tighten the four hinges with an allen key that comes in the travel bag. There’s a small cutout at the top of the bag where you can store the allen key, so if you carry this stand with you in your laptop bag, you’ll always have it handy when you need to adjust it again.

A team of ergonomics specialists and statisticians gathered information about the challenges laptop users face to identify specific design requirements for a new adjustable stand. These requirements were then refined by a 2-phase experimental design involving 25 office workers–13 men and 12 women-who either used the newly designed stand or completed a typing task without adjusting their laptop height using conventional methods. The results indicated that utilizing the newly designed stand significantly enhanced upper body posture and diminished locally perceived discomfort in determined regions while increasing typing accuracy.