I like the suggestion, to NEVER use a laptop unless absolutely necessary. They were never meant to replace a good working Desktop computer.
Having said that.....
Do to the way everything is crammed into such a small space, laptops always run under less than optimal conditions.
I do a lot of tweaking and tuning on laptops, (I'm a PC Service Tech, self employed) to get more performance out of them with minimal heating. I shut down every program and Service on the lappy that is not Absolutely 100% necessary to be running all the time.
Then I set the hard drive to spin down after about 5 minutes of inactivity, even when running on house power. Laptop hard drives are a huge source of heat, and they
do not have their own cooling fan. The heat has to be removed by the same fan that cools the CPU, so it's sometimes hard to tell which one is producing the most heat.
For, like forever, the AMD cpu has a built in "Life Preserver" circuit, that ramps DOWN the clock speed when the chip gets hot, to slow the cpu and minimize heating, so it doesn't burn itself up. That may show up in a loss of performance, but at least the cpu doesn't cremate itself.
I caution my laptop users (Customers) to not run any more apps at one time than absolutely necessary. And NEVER sit their laptop on a bed, carpeting or even their lap, or any cloth surface that could block the air vents.
And, when they are done with it for the day, SHUT IT OFF. There are certain maintenance routines that Windows performs in the background that it can only perform while shutting down.
Good Luck with those laptops, guys and gals!
My own Windows 8.1 machines run just as cool as they did with Windows XP. No overheating problems here!
TechnoMage