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Do a search and you will find Walmart and others have laptop stands for only a few dollars. I bought a couple of stands for my grandchildren and they say the Laptop is much cooler now.

And when you get the laptop stand with fans, run them off of a separate USB port plugged into the wall. Do not use the laptop’s USB ports as this just adds to the heat problem.

As an aside to illustrate why you want to cool, many years ago I was certified by IBM to install their “Gearbox” industrial servers. This was basically an IBM Model 90 microchannel machine but every component was installed in its own plastic cage – motherboard with CPU, adapters, and especially the hard drives. Then there were big fans on both the top and bottom of this cage. The top ones sucking out hot air and the bottoms ones blowing cool air in. In the IBM Model 90, the hard drives were rated at (something like) three years mean time between failure. The same hard drives inside the Gearbox cage were rated at a mean time between failure of 10 years.

Its the EYEBALLS!
With every new version of Windows – 2000, XP, 7 and now 8, Microsoft has taken great steps to “brand” each version. And with each of these brandings, icons got rounder and softer, and colors became more pastel and lighter. MY EYES CAN’T TAKE IT. I am 73 now and still like small icons on the desktop, but it is becoming really hard to find them and/or recognize them. Thus I am less productive.

No doubt that Windows 8 is faster and more secure. But why not allow me to select the UI that is most productive for me. Let me have Windows 8.+ with the Windows 7 UI. Or even let me go back to the Windows 2000 UI if that works best for me.

On a side note, the same thing goes for Office. I hate the Office 2013 look and feel. I hate the Office ribbon. I buy and install Classic Menu for Office to get back to the pull down menus – which are a 1000% more productive for me. And Office 2013 with no lines separating user features, not even the title bar at the top of the pane with the focus. Again, now it is my eyes that hurt and my productivity that suffers.

I’ve used Windows back when it started under DOS. I worked in the industry for 20 years installing everything from closets to servers to desktops and trained Windows and Office. My first 20 years was flying the RF-4C Phantom II, so my eyeballs are pretty good. But right on schedule at age 42 the eyes started to change. But I did not use glasses until age 55.

Now it is all about my eyes. I need a UI that works for me. Give me back the UI that works best for the user. Then I think Microsoft would have a Windows that works!

Maybe the missing lines are just hidden by some formatting issue. Try this, download the damaged document to your hard drive. Then open it in notepad to see if the missing text shows in notepad. (I put notepad in my “Send To” just to make this easy.)

I do this all the time – replace a paragraph marker ¶ with a space or even just remove the marker. But there can be some tricks to it.

If it is a text file you imported, what appears at the end of each line – ¶ – may not be a paragraph maker (a two character code of a carriage return [hex 0d] and line feed [hex 0a]) but just one of these. That is only just a carriage return or a line feed. Then the replace ^p will not work.

The easiest way to test this is use the Find Next button of the Replace panel looking for a ¶ using the ^p. If nothing is found, then try using the ^013 (for carrage return) or ^010 for line feed in the ‘find what’ line. Then use that code for the replace all.

I often use the replace all to eliminate the blank lines by first doing a replace all double paragraph markers ¶ ¶ ( ‘find what:’ ^p^p) with just one ¶ (replace with:’ ^p).

Or if every line in the document ends with a paragraph marker AND each paragraph has two paragraph markers (one at the end of the line and one at the left margin), and you want to put the paragraphs back together, then I replace the double paragraph markers (¶¶) with something that is not in the document like &&&&, then go back and replace all single line paragraph markers with a space, then go back and replace the &&&& with two paragraph markers again (to get the paragraphs back as they should be.)

There may be some variations here, such as the blank lines with a paragraph marker in the left margin have a space first, then you would use ^p ^p. But even with a 13 meg document, if the replace results are not what you wanted, undo it with Ctrl-Z.

Microsoft Word (all versions) is really a relational database. The text is one database table and all the paragraph formatting (like margins or space before or space after, etc) is a second database table related to the text table by line number and offset into the line. And all the formatting for any one paragraph is carried in the paragraph marker.

To show how neat this can be, put the cursor just in front of a paragraph marker, then highlight just the paragraph marker with a single right arrow move. Then copy (Ctrl-C) the marker. Then place the insertion point next to a paragraph marker in a different paragraph – one with significantly different formation (margins for instance), and press Ctrl-V to insert the copied paragraph marker. Poof, the paragraph how has the format of the earlier paragraph.