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Answer to question 1: I have an external keyboard, external mouse, a cooling pad, and a WiFi booster device, all pulling power from the laptop. My built-in keyboard is fried and needs replacing. It is disconnected at this time. The mouse works far better than the touch-pad on the laptop, so I disabled it in favor of the external. The cooling pad should be moving more air though the machine but some clogs might have accumulated since the cleaning I did two weeks ago. The WiFi Booster helps with the connection to the internet as I live where WiFi is provided by the landlord, and the signal would be a bit out of range without it.
Question 2: Space heater is sometimes used but I keep it a good distance from my machine. and the computer gets hot even when there is cool air.
Question 3: All air vents are kept unobstructed.
Question 4: I have 2 cats and they are why I perform a regular cleaning of the ventilation system. I remove the access panels and use a soft dry artist's fan brush and a bit of canned air to do as thorough a cleaning as can be done once a month. I rarely find any accumulation beyond a very tiny amount of dust.
Question 5:I have not checked into having the hardware firmware drivers updated. I did not know about this possibility.
Those are my answers, and I certainly will check into your suggestions, especially concerning those updates. I also have plans to find a good used computer tower, and to perform maintenance and upgrades on my laptop. I do not need anything other than the tower to have all I need for a good desktop computer, as I have a 26" flat screen TV (Toshiba) that will work nicely as a monitor, A keyboard, and a Mouse. I also have two external hard drives, and several usb flash drives. Once i have that up and running, I will give my laptop a gradual overhaul until everything is fixed and all upgrades are completed.
I have been searching around for a used tower that has Windows 7, a quad core i5 or i7 processor, 8 or more GB RAM, and a recent video card. It should also be WiFi capable. For those of you asking me why not Windows 8 or 8.1, I point you to the postings all over the internet about how many older programs will not run on the new operating systems. I'll stick with Windows 7 until Microsoft gets the message about that.
Nothing wrong with W7, I'm a mac tech by profession for a dozen years and W7 is my OS of choice.
8GB or more, go with more, RAM's cheap by volume and more and more it's necessary as 3D packages add new and exciting features.
back to USB: your mouse and keyboard are very low power consumption devices so I don't see them as possible culprits, however the cooler has moving parts and moving parts will put a draw on power especially when the CPU is cranked to render at 100% power by default (you can change that btw,*) I don't know about the booster, but if you can pull those two out of the equation for a test (along with the space heater) and it works than thats what's happening. If you need the cooler and the booster you may consider using a powered USB hub and plugging the devices into that. You can get those on Amazon, New Egg, Wallmart, Staples, etc.
Space heaters do terrible things to computers and my service call numbers skyrocketed in the winter when people brought space heaters into their offices and many honestly thought they had computer virus because their systems were so wonky when exposed to the heat and dry air. Your laptop CPU generates more heat than a 120W bulb when it's at 100% and it's fighting to keep cool air on it. If the device is shutting down your violating a setting in your BIOS that is there to protect your computer from permanent damage.
I can also tell you spraying compressed air into a laptp when you have pets or pet hair helps, but often there is so much hair buildup you don't see it's like your computer is trying to grow another cat or dog, I've seen this too when you open laptops up. You can open the laptop up with a screwdriver but often this is a can of worms and you don't want to, or you can use a vacuum cleaner but you must be very careful with static and again; dry air. I recommend if you do this use a rubber mat and a wrist strap if you're getting in close and if the room is cold and dry you will become more frighteningly electric than when Pete Seiger saw Dylan with a Stratocaster and burned down Madison Square Garden in a folksy temper tantrum.
Here's how you can cut core use down on an application:
Press Control+Shift+Esc to get your taskmanager up.
Click on the Processes tab
Find the process, probably "Daz Studio" or "3Delight"
Right-click on the process
Click on Set Affinity
Here you can select which processor(s) your process will use.
I took the bottom off and checked the inside for any accumulation and to do any necessary cleaning. The inside was dust and cat hair free, just as it is always.
I will see if I can do better with those devices disconnected. When rendering the internal fan speeds up at certain points in the image and the area remains black for a bit. It usually gets through that area after a few seconds. Those areas usually have a fair amount of complexity.
Anyway, I'm working the list to eliminate as much of the problem as I can.
On the Subject of My Next Computer:
I understand about getting more RAM than 8GB; however, none of the used ones I have looked at so far have any more than that. The ones I checked out and tested were all running well, but most of them were 32 bit and no more than 3GB RAM. There were two towers with 8GB RAM, quad core pocessors, one an i5, the other an i7. If I can swing it soon enough, I want the i7.
32 bit OS can only access 3-4 GB RAM, XP accesses 2 by default. My Win7 64 from boot to loading DS4.6 64 has swallowed 3GB RAM and if you plan to render with DS open your eating more RAM. It's not always great to get some RAM now, and some more later, it's better to get it all at the same time from the same batch if possible. It's not nearly as critical as it was years ago, it's gotten better but mix and match you can run into problems, 7 GB of DDR3 at 1.6GHz with 1 GB DDR3 at 1 GHz = 8 GB DDR3 at 1 GHz. it will all sync to the slowest chip's speed. I topped out at 8 GB very quickly when went from XP to W7 about 3 years ago, I got 12 GB cus at the time that was my Motherboards limit, I've also topped out the 12 but it's a rare thing. When I get some scratch I do plan to up to 24 GB but my rendering needs may be very different than yours. I use Adobe Creative Suite, LuxRender, Blender, and sometimes I need them all open. BTW That i7 makes a big difference than the i5 if you stick with Intel, especially when you get down to rendering. You don't need the top of the line model either, the speed of a 3.2GHz and 3.4GHz does not even come close to justify the price discrepancy they ask for it unless you are given to brag about CPU's to other gear heads who are within earshot, otherwise the current i7's are basically all the same with substantially different price tags and they all have great overhead if you wish to overclock them.