Computer not strong enough for my mods or changes I can make?

[destructivefox]

So I made the mistake thinking I would want a laptop for college 3 years ago and now I'm stuck with it even though I find it hard to even do homework on it for a long period of time since I can't sit comfortably with it let alone games. Even so, I play on it anyway since its my only option when I'm back in my dorm. My laptop is MSI fx603 with an i5-480m cpu, Nvidia GT 425M and 6gb ram. When I got it I fully intended it to run New Vegas, Fallout 3 and even Skyrim. I also knew it would handle simpler mods better or at least Project Nevada, which was my entire reason for wanting to mod after switching from 360 playing. But as somebody who actively avoids most multi-player game to avoid stressing out over playing, I wanted to have more and more immersion to enjoy single player experiences. To me this means that I like Fallout and such to look and act as realistic as possible. So I ended up downloading and trying to use Project Reality, NMC's texture packs large and small (I don't know if there is any performance difference) and so on to get the immerse feeling. After messing with the settings I am currently able to play on ultra settings, anti-aliasing and filtering off for performance and I get 20-30 fps outdoors with fraps (if I look up at the sky without as many textures to render it skyrockets to 80-120). It is smooth most of the time with tiny bits of lag every 10 minutes or so which are a little immersion breaking although I adapted since its less than a few seconds. But I am also worried about sometimes overheating my laptop. My last cooling pad broke and my roommate's old one conflicts with my laptop's small legs and wants to slide everywhere even though its fans are powerful. After V-Sync is turned on it cools down compared to letting it go free and the fps actually seem to still be allowed to go higher than 30 but not as much when looking at the sky. I don't have much experience with v-sync so I didn't know if that will still happen.

 

Now the home computer I am on right now while for the weekend was custom built with an AMD Phenom II x4, 8gb ram and I believe a 6870 1gb graphics card of some brand. I put roughly the same mods on this computer for a test and cranked anti-aliasing and filtering up to max and v-sync off and fraps reads 25ish fps outside and doesn't go much higher, but the frames are almost completely stable and it still seems to run smoother and looks nicer than my laptop. Is there something I'm missing that makes up for the performance and frame differences?

 

And my more important note, can anybody give some tips or changes I can make to get the most immersion out of my laptop without overheating it and are there any mods I may have installed that mess up my performance for how little they give me in terms of game play experience? I have already installed stutter remover and fnv4gb. I can post my load order so everybody can actually see what mods I have on later when I can.

 

Any ideas are greatly appreciated and sorry for the long read.