Laptop Locking Up

[Froglok]

I've been having some odd issues with my laptop that I've never had before with any game, it's randomly seizing up to a black screen or a black screen with some vertical white lines. I'm not sure it's just overheating but it's hard to tell because it's never done this before with games and I'm playing Everquest, of all games, with the old models and low graphics settings.

I tried putting my laptop on a large cold book to prevent the vents from getting covered, but this isn't helping. I lowered the max frame-rate in the options settings to 30 as well as other graphics settings and this seems to have lowered the occurrences, but it's still happening. The laptop is barely a year old too. Does anyone have any suggestions for what I can do other than buy a new laptop?

Thanks.