davisconnorscot

I fold 24x7 on "up to" three laptops at a time using Folding@Home Chrome NaCl (native client) ... two ACER laptops are 9 years old and Lenovo is two years old (also have up to three Desktops folding 24x7 and an occasional AWS cloud GPU instance) It's true, they can get toasty, but if you keep the cooling ports clear (this includes NOT keeping them running while on bed-sheets) and blowing out the dust out of the cooling grid an fan every couple of months with canned air (careful not to overspeed the fan bearings when blowing canned air through them), they're usually fine. Even if they overheat, all they've done for me is automatically shut down and wait for a restart. Usually the worst that happens is, your fan bearings can wear out and usually those are more difficult to replace than Desktop fans. So if you want to fold but stay cautious, fold on the low setting during the day, and set it to medium at night (when it's usually cooler) ... or buy an external cooling fan like one person suggested. As you've probably figured out, folding isn't exactly free when done on a large scale - that's why teams like curecoin.net are attempting to correlated folding with actual monetary value in the form of cryptocurrency.