Portable HVAC in Dorm not cooling

[aqua_regia]

I have a CUL 8,500 BTU portable air conditioner, not a window mounted unit, but the kind with the flex hosing that pipes hot air out the window. Supposedly this unit can cool several hundred square feet, 400 according to Lowes, with ease, but in the dorm (175.5 sqFt) it can barely cool the room at all. We have several heat sources in the room mainly computers however in such a small space it seems the heat would be easily off set by the air conditioner. The air coming off the unit is cool at ~55 degrees F, but the room temp remains at a constant 77 degrees F. One solution we thought of was to replace the thin plastic exhaust hose with 6" insulated flex duct to keep the hot exhaust out of the room as much as possible, but this has not helped much either. Any other Ideas from you pros would be greatly appreciated, we are burning up in here!

[mark beiser]

A small window unit would do a much better job than a portable AC unit.

The exhaust air from the unit comes from within the room, and gets replaced with air that leaks in from outside, and the rest of the building, so you probably have several air changes per hour in the room.