As a someone new to folding@home I had to try out folding on my Dell Vostro laptop. So far it seems like might be more trouble than it is worth.
My first attempt was to load the single core tray client. With Vista, a 100% setting shows up as 50% on each core. The laptop gets warm but nothing more than it would web surfing. The bigest drawback to this is that it takes nearly three days to process a 750 point WU.
My next attempt was to load the SMP multi core client. After a fairly tricky installation, I got the client to run, but the laptop fan had to run at full speed to keep it cool. In adition, it was taking over an hour per percent on a 1.4GHz Core2Duo. If I had let it run that would work out to about 500 points or so (with a 1750 point WU).
For my third attempt I got a little braver. I loaded the latest Nvidia driver from their notebook driver page. It seems a little confusing to me. The Stanford site dirrected me to Nvidia's CUDA page, but as far as I can tell you only need a driver with a 180 or higher revision and the GPU client will run just fine. Interestingly enough, running the 8600GT at full out generates less heat than running the CPU at 100%. I actually had to load the single core client as well. I did that to keep the laptop fan from cycling on and off every 2 minutes. I prefer to have the laptop run warm at a constant temp than to thermal cycle the thing.
So far it is taking 31 minutes per percent. I could not find the WU number listed on the site so I am going to have to wait to find out what kind of points per day it come out too.